Gaunt flash of luminous yellow beating through the wood,
wórd today was a cloudless sulphur, Phoebis sennae.
Sad violent heart of the trillium, flame azalea,
clades, mushrooms & flowers, diadem is a beautiful world.
Once, I picked up a hawk-moth Laothoe populi
saturated in the low values of moonlight—
it pulsed in my hand; touched me w/ the fingers on its head.
The night was in it. It was sickening. I threw it away.
It flopped down in the dark vegetation & crept backward
hissing & purring. Insight: death is not yr enemy,
but the corruption of sin is real; hell is real; judgment, real.
Maybe. Maybe, Tíger in deep waters off Kure.
Maybe, tanager humble-bragging in the fire-tipped qualia
of the redbud as it expresses itself here & now,
en mí, as I experience it, mí, little psalm, the mourning dove
calls as if you blew through it & the dove rose & rose.
What is scared is what is present. Sacred. What is sacred,
clumsy finger. You walk alone like an executioner.
Toby Martinez de las Rivas has published three collections with Faber & Faber: Terror, Black Sun, and Floodmeadow. He has a selection in Penguin Modern Poets 7: These Hard & Shining Things and is the Blackburn Distinguished Artist in Residence at Duke University.
