one by one the moths
find their way into the building,
lose themselves in high corners
and dingy stairwells
cupping my hands I
usher what few I can off
the fire escape, blowing them
to whatever dusty fate is theirs
but more often find stilled
wings, unmoving corpses along
the baseboards beneath
the hallway lights
I think they know there’s
no moon here, but flock
to false incandescence for scant
safety in a poor substitute
but how else
does one escape the spiders?
© Sarah Whiteley
my father’s father kept the accounts
for a coal mine in eastern Pennsylvania
until one Valentine’s Day his heart quit
on him and birthed a widow in its stead
driving through the corrugated remains
of a Poconos coal town it’s unsettling
to think how the experiences of others
will invariably influence our own
and I wonder how that suddenly empty seat
might have turned the course of that
twelve-year old boy who would in forty years
be my father and was he as hollowed out
as the empty mines that gutted the hills,
or as that old miner’s shack crouched
at the base of the rocks weeping rust
and coal dust for thirty years and more
earlier that morning I’d been snailing along
in the car lost in the sudden morning fog
of November in the Alleghenies with every turn
and curve a ‘poke at fate’ in near-zero visibility
when God or Providence or what-have-you
sent succor in the hulking form of a Kenmore truck
whose keeper leaned his elbows on my window
and said it’s ok, just follow me
I was drawn in by the confidence of his long
experience and followed the red trail
of his hazards to the next town,
where I turned off with a double-honk of thanks
now trawling through the landscape of my father’s youth
I wonder how it was he found his way through the fog
with no light to follow but miners’ lamps disappearing
into dark shafts, and no one to say just follow me
© Sarah Whiteley
this morning
a dust-white moth
flittered impervious
to improbability
precarious outside the window
twenty-seven floors up
and I, more unsettled than he,
held how quick the rise to love
how equally impervious
and fragile as moths
these improbable elevations
it is nothing less
and it is so much more
than flinging oneself beyond
this safety of glass
© Sarah Whiteley
ebbtide 