Today, tucked in a dark corner of the back entry,
I found the jar with its curious, at first
unidentified contents, what looked like
a peaty lump and a smear of some viscous black
substance. It jogged a memory of finding
last fall in one of the lilacs a kind
of walnut-sized purse apparently sewn
together from dead leaves. And here it
was, more or less intact, the leaf-veins
clearly visible, if a little more
ragged than I’d found it. But what of
the other, stickier mass? Examining
it, I felt a sickness creep over me.
Articulated in the putrescent
mess, delicate legs, once-feathery
antennae told the story—the purse,
a cocoon as I’d guessed, had hatched and
the smeary body, its inhabitant, had
perished in captivity, shelved and
forgotten in our back entry. Doing now
what I should have done last year, I looked
it up and determined it to be a
cecropia, the largest moth in North
America. It would have been beautiful.
I didn’t know what it was, but I should have.
I did the only thing I could then and took
the jar out under the lilacs, returned
the wasted remains to the earth
of its sojourning. And, looking up
at the air this splendid moth would have flown
for a season had not my carelessness
condemned it to a birth that was a death,
I owned my guilt to the living world,
and later wondered, if we ruin
the planet with our uncaring disregard
for its tender fragility, its wings
that need clean space to unfold in, will
our stricken apologetic cry
also be, We didn’t know what it was.

No larger than a pea,
this miniature shell affixed
to the stone I pick from Cass Lake.
Back from the center seam
fine lines of brown and green curve
on a handsome blue-eyed blue.
Zebra mussel, I believe you want to live,
so far as a creature so elementary can,
and I don’t blame you for the damage
you do, in terrible innocence,
to our northern waters. I believe
that inside your tiny closed helmet,
razor-sharp to the feet of unwary swimmers,
you also keep a grain of God.
But where you sow your profligate seed,
other lives, of fish and of plants,
fade as though you were a bag of poison
dumped from a boat. You sprout
on every small, wave-washed stone
I examine on this lake’s life-
cleansed shoreline, a morbid, sterilizing
beauty. My heart becomes a wet stone
sinking in dismay at how one
so small can desolate its world.