Moth, 2:30 a.m.

Moth, 2:30 a.m.

Mustn’t she?  In weather like this?  Because a month ago

it was forty degrees warmer it was warm so warm on the ground

she didn’t need this: at two thirty in the morning when the click

of the latch in my brain is a meek concussion when the knob on the door

turns as by some prowl a small light two really pointing

down but going up too up enough to illuminate the tree

branches outside to be a soft electric dependable moon oh yes

she needs dependable.  Tap.  Tap Tap.  It’s the tap of her thin finger

carapace her sleeve her sheath from thorax to abdomen that really clashes

with the glass but not a clash really more a desperate act of getting

it all out before she in thischill beats as much warmth into herself as she can.

It’s 28 degrees outside.  And when light arrives it’s proving to be see

your breath weather.  She (and this is fleeting it is so brief) she is a measure

of foreboding a messenger with her thin needy wings and my funeral

light is the only one on in the neighborhood.  But listen: in this second floor

bedroom when my daughter when she was small used to sleep in a crib

under this window she'd toss off  her blanket her milk dreams her unzipped

cocoon.  And a tiny nightlight under the window.  And that very same :  Tap.  Tap

Tap.  But brief.  Because she was born on the edge of winter.  It was as generous 

as an early green in the way it drops off at night and makes us follow warm and then

a hot summer then back to winter to turn the bed down to pull the old quilt up right

to the chin the way this light must seem to do to the moth.  It seduces.  She

can’t help her brief life.  Or her urge to light and to fly the rest of it up

to the glass and tap in, spending the last of herself arriving, arriving.