Lepidopteran: A Cento
By Linda Bierds
Lines and phrases by Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, and Thomas Hardy
In ... the whitish muslin of a wide-mouthed net,
in time of the breaking of nations,
and in elementary arithmetic,
the lichen-gray primaries
keep in sufficiently close touch
as to impose one part of a pattern onto another.
The vibrational halo
of the string figures
passing from flower to flower,
border to border —
night-moths of measureless size,
circling
among the young, among the weak and old,
hawk-moths at dusk
hatching
the war-adept in the mornings —
the vibrational halo
near the great wings
is not the judgment-hour,
only thin smoke without flame
written on terrestrial things.
I confess I do not believe in time.
And the highest enjoyment of timelessness
is an imitation game ... filled with
the mysteries of mimicry ... But
when a certain moth resembles a certain wasp
and a deadly cipher
flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
what is our solution?
Peace on earth and silence in the sky?
I think that is not
the faith and fire within us ... Still,
I look into the depth of
each breeding-cage,
each floating-point form
cleft into light and shade,
hoping it might be so.
