The outside is in you now—
that scarlet fall of maple too bright
to be believed in on this dark day.
Does the rain make you wait?
The skittery path of a morning
moth? It flies too low and slowly.
More likely company, white pine and cedar
keeping the saw-whets from grief.
You’d never know they’re there
but for their mewling calls. Just a day,
a night, a day as they make their way
south, southwest to the wintering places.

I never told you about the summer moth
wide as my palms, auburn shading
to doe-brown, fringe of pink
fading to a blue luna line.
I found her under the new pear,
wings flush with the summer grass.
Heartbroken or dying it seemed
until she shuddered eyespot to eye,
a lidless waking on the powdery
slope of wing. Two small rondels
see-through as cellophane, clear
as prayers, one world to the next.
Lying flat, warmed by the earth,
there’s just a glimpse of grass.
But imagine them in flight—
Antheraea polyphemus— the moving blue
eye of sky caught in the round pane,
all the places you might be hidden;
I’ll wait for the color, watch for the wing.

Catherine Staples is the author of two collections of poems: The Rattling Window (The Ashland Poetry Press) and Never a Note Forfeit (Seven Kitchens Press). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Commonweal, Third Coast, The Gettysburg Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Rattle among other journals. She teaches in the Honors and English programs at Villanova University and lives in Devon, Pennsylvania.