Giant Moth Perishes - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Geoffrey Nutter is the author of A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016). He recently traveled in China, giving lectures, workshops, and readings as a participant in the Sun Yat-sen University Writers’ Residency. Geoffrey’s poems have been translated into Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Soir d’été, a bilingual edition of his poems translated into French by poets Molly Lou Freeman and Julien Marcland, was recently published in France, and a German translation of his book Water’s Leaves & Other Poems will appear in 2021. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, the New School, and 92nd Street Y. He currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.

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Giant Moth Perishes

Giant moth perishes: this was what

the exorcist listened to when staring

into space. And to think that even small praises

very small, are wrought among vines on Syrian jars,

and upon the jars of Persia. And birds

are in the vines, among the praises,

calling down among the nightshades

where the giant moth perishes.

And she brushes the enormous infrastructure

with her wings.

The Land of Mighty Insects

The cat remembers the secret you shared

with her on a night that seems to have passed

a century or a century and a half ago.

Long past midnight, insomniac, and the private

and celebratory pod reserved for your party

at neon-green Korea Town. This

was a cobalt cat curled on an overstuffed chair

overspread with a fringed gold counterpane.

Time passes. And one day, when you strike up

a park bench acquaintance with some stranger,

and the city is glittering behind him,

glittering and splintering with glass and flares,

the idea just on the tongue was the same secret,

and you long for a lover to go with the secret.

The stranger stands tall as an ultimatum.

And you are as one who has spent her entire life

living high in the branches of a tree, surviving

off its fruit while giant insects rage below.