She tells me I am panicking, to try to take steady, slow breaths.
I wasn’t panicking when this started, I was asleep.
Asleep sitting up, of course, but unconscious, undreaming.
I open my mouth to say so and a moth flaps out,
like a bird from a housefire.
He flop/flies around from front seat to back,
smushing himself into the upholstery
until finally clinging to the rear window
like a vertical hyphen in a ruined sentence.
I have a strange dissociated hope
that he can find his way out of the car.
It would, I think, be a shame to die clinging to
the rear window of an SUV in a hospital parking lot,
able to see your freedom through the glass
but then quietly frying in the following day’s sun.
And then, like a blackout,
hospital staff are swarming around me,
wheelchair and pressure cuff,
starting an IV, my attention is pulled,
and another of my moths is gone forever,
a calm ascent into a densely libraried
chronology of moments.
