Moth Medicine
I dreamed last night of moths and naked women.
The stage was set.
The audience gathered.
Let the memorial begin, I thought.
But the night is for flying, for softdust wings and moving antennae.
Not theaters packed with staring eyes and vacant bodies and half-hearted eulogies.
Give me the cool night air.
Give me skin that can drink in this moonlight.
Give me no walls, no stages, no patronizing words for the dead.
They looked at me as I stripped.
They turned those hard stares my way as I walked out, bare as the day I was born.
I knew what they saw and then turned away from:
My arms were gathering a fine, soft black wing dust.
I was sprouting ferns from my head.
With every step I took out of that theater, eyes grew larger~ theirs and mine.
It was only after I'd entered the dark space beyond the metal doors that gravity lost his purchase, and I lifted into the air.
Somewhere between the seat where I'd begun to grow roots and the heavy steel exit, I'd pushed out finely veined wings.
The trees and night-lit air were calling out an ancient song, an autumn-ripe serenade that finished the job, leaving me toe- and fingerless.
My eyes perceived the red light of heat under the surface of things, and my fragile legs brushed against the delicately veined leaves of November, tasting their movement across the threshold and through the veil separating here and not-here.
The songs of the spirits beckoned me closer, and I found their hands lifted in praise of the night, the eternal light that lives inside the tree’s trunk, the stone’s center, the withered wild apple as it clung to the last willing branch.
The spirits welcomed me, and smiled their faceless smiles as I drew closer. An open palm, a dispensation, a shower of golden light, an impartation, a loving gaze, and I was sent out once more.
“Return, return, return,” they chanted. “Bring back the gentle light, the sweet-winged touch. Breathe the warm air over faces and arms, call to the hearts. Whisper the secrets of healing into the ears that will listen.”
And I did.