What flutters in darkness

...where no moon shines

A darkling moth, night-winged bringer of dreams, clings to the ceiling over the bed. I glance up from the page I am reading to see my cat staring at it raptly, ready to spring at every wing flicker.

I try to capture the moth, to take it out into the night, but the fluttering creature is too subtle for my grasp. It just draws its cloak of invisibility about itself, and vanishes like a magic trick.

In the morning I search for the moth. But it has dispersed like smoke, like the complicated dream narratives that shaped my sleep.

I must wait another day to be a rescuer of moths.

I feel anxious. Changing small things from the way they are and into the way I think they should be rules my days.

I vacuum up cobwebs in the subconscious realm of our house, the basement. I am like a little goddess of order, an entwife of dark places.

This is where I bring the winter spiders and centipedes. Usually after they try to claim a bathtub or sink for themselves. On warm days, I release them into a shady, damp corner of the garden. But on freezing days, they are escorted to the basement, their dusky playground.

As I attack silk lines slung between ceiling joists and dusty webs spun against glass block windows, spiders flee. Most are so frail, mere wisps — crooked legs made of hair and dust, nearly invisible.

I try to do no harm. I try to disappear only deserted webs, not their spinners. Watching them hurry away from the vortex of doom in my hands brings feelings of guilt. Here I am, wielding the power of life and death. Being feared by other creatures is the sorrow of the human condition. And these days I am not a person who intentionally kills spiders. Even so, were I to kill one accidentally, I would feel less culpable than if I did it on purpose. A fine point of ethics that may matter to a human, but a distinction without a difference to a spider.

This is an old house, and the basement is mostly unfinished. A basement is mandatory to well being, in my opinion. There are houses without basements and frankly, I don’t trust them.

Houses, like people, need someplace for darkness and dank corners to live … someplace for cobwebs and crumbling plaster. Places where the past lingers, where things are imperfect and not altogether clean, where shadows dwell forgotten, where tiny, creeping lives are allowed to coexist alongside us.

Where else but a basement can we wait out tornadoes, or store the detritus of former selves we are not yet ready to let go of? Where else can we befriend our fears? Where else can we bring the spiders?

A lone robin stands motionless in the middle of the street in front of our house. Birds seem to be in constant motion so this stillness arrests me. No foraging. No running in short bursts along the ground, as robins often do. Only catching raindrops on his feathers after a warm day.

This contemplative robin charms yet worries me. How vulnerable he is, standing there in the open, on the ground. I watch for a few minutes, scouting for prowling cats and cars. What would I do, anyway? How could I save the robin? All I can do is be a witness to triumph or disaster.

Upon receipt of some silent message, this meditation on mortality is broken. The robin abruptly wings off into the trees with a characteristic chirp, and my vigil is done.

Crisis averted.

Next evening as I prepare for bed, the moth re-materializes.

Its tenebrous wings shape a triangle upon the bathroom’s white subway tiles. Somehow, though the overhead lights make the room bright as day, the moth’s eyes tell it that it is in fact night, time to be on the wing.

These shadowy wings were meant to camouflage it from predators in darkness. The moth was born to drink nectar under the night sky. Again, my conscience twinges. Too much of the moth’s brief life has already been spent confined to rooms where no moon shines, no flower blooms. How long can he survive this way?

I try again to help. But the moth will not allow it, does not understand my intention. It again disappears before my eyes. The moth’s instinct is to avoid capture, not realizing it has already been captured from the wild. The poor creature is wasting its life inside these walls, I think.

But whether I am thinking about the moth, or myself, is anyone’s guess.

It rains. I pull weeds. It rains. I pull weeds — even the tiniest green baby bows of crabgrass along the path. One hundred and fifty thousand seeds can be produced from a single crabgrass plant, I read. How marvelous or terrifying to be that generative — like a genius, like a god.

I, on the other hand, am like this clover that hugs the soil, clinging to where I am as if my life depends upon it.

Perhaps also a bit like this tiny insect holding onto a window screen during this torrential rain.

Life and death again.

I try to write anything worth reading. To control what I can control. To do things in my power to do. To rescue myself.

Still, the moth eludes me.

When it crosses back into the physical realm tonight, on night-colored wings, I promise myself I will be ready.