winter moth I put your body on
and I was happy with the armor
flight was both possible and necessary
since I was light, brittle and miniature
flight was both happy and panicky
now that I was inside your body
my awareness stretching far beyond
my wingspan and erratic decision-making pattern
I was now entirely akin to myself
now I resembled myself both inside and out
who’s the guy with the new temporality
of a moth’s life, only a day or two
in his resplendent, powdery body
before annihilation minus zero
when January in one enormous puff
exhaled ice across the landscape?
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Excerpt from THE MATH CAMPERS by Dan Chiasson. Copyright © 2021 by Dan Chiasson. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Dan Chiasson
Dan Chiasson is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently Bicentennial, and a book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. He is the poetry critic for The New Yorker. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Writers Award, Chiasson is the Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College, and lives in Massachussetts.
