Lepidopteran: A Cento

Lines and phrases by Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, and Thomas Hardy

In    ...    the whitish muslin of a wide-mouthed net,
in time of the breaking of nations,
and in elementary arithmetic,

the lichen-gray primaries
keep in sufficiently close touch
as to impose one part of a pattern onto another.

The vibrational halo
of the string figures
passing from flower to flower,

border to border — 
night-moths of measureless size,
circling

among the young, among the weak and old,
hawk-moths at dusk
hatching

the war-adept in the mornings — 
the vibrational halo
near the great wings

is not the judgment-hour,
only thin smoke without flame
written on terrestrial things.

I confess I do not believe in time.
And the highest enjoyment of timelessness
is an imitation game    ...    filled with

the mysteries of mimicry    ...    But
when a certain moth resembles a certain wasp
and a deadly cipher

flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
what is our solution?
Peace on earth and silence in the sky?

I think that is not
the faith and fire within us    ...    Still,
I look into the depth of

each breeding-cage,
each floating-point form
cleft into light and shade,

hoping it might be so.

Source: Poetry (September 2017)