This was the salvageable part of my contribution. Echoes a particular poem of Brodsky's, which incidentally echoed an earlier short story by Nabokov.

         3

  
         In the depths of the Soviet winter, in the ponderous cold
 Of Siberia, a boy cups an abandoned moth in his hands,
 Born – to die a few hours old –

  
         Into a false firewood springtime.  Its delicate wings
 Are only an affront to the divine benevolence; he understands
 Nothing; his hands, like an insect coffin, bear the stings

  
         Of the nails themselves; like a dry cocoon, absently,
 They drift to the shack wall, and the fingers fan,
 In unison, a camouflaged figure in the pinewood pantry.

  
         This tender sign... a tenderness snuffed out.
 This heavy icon, then... true mimic of an action?
 Or only the swollen, distorted wings of a parasite?
  
         Or only the screech of broken chalk on slate?
 Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations
 At the edge of the cliff – their noise intuitive, innate...

  
         The butterfly is gone.  Its form was here, immaculate;
 The hands tracing its flight, aimless, serpentine,
 Mimic its undetermined motion – late, late –

  
         Since that double-woven fountain, afloat with indirection,
 Surging, sparkling, translucent, seeks its mate
 In a signal heaven – a camouflage beyond dissection.


      
                                     2.2.96

(the poem ("Joseph Brodsky") was published on the op-ed page of the Providence Journal not long after it was written. Curiously, WB Yeats wrote & published a short series of articles for the same paper, in the 1890s. I think they were about aspects of Irish culture and their offshoots in America.)