Why they kill gypsy moths

"All visible things need a cross... All intelligible things need a tomb"

(Maximus Confessor)

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I got it from the rose & cicadas (as also later from the fruit flies that watch for Ruth)& they said the gypsy, dying gypsy, who looks up at a thick rind sky as it lies eye-level over

the sweet loofah & rye--the gypsy dies & becoming dust rises to the top of both stalk and sky.

And always in this way, the star-stitched gypsy turns to dust. But, again, just as they said (and I also sensed from the fateful flutter & wings of dust, wings praiseworthy for flight!), it’s

the soul-bearing and frail moth that lifts and arcs, & stalks past pig-weed and grasses with its cane, knocking out bits of shale and algae to fight the slimy world.

A gypsy's silly cane! cloaked in dust against all that world's hard slimy shale! And it tries to look deep (dusty moth!) into a pond's own hurt or a lake's dark stony seed, and to soften all

that carnal hurt of rock, algae and dirt.

Straining hard towards the world, when it flies , they say it rises with a cane made of rye! the gypsy moth, with dusty wings, that lies in a dark serpentine world.

(2014)