The smallest moth, called a "leafminer",
drinks from a bendy straw on her chin,
breathes through her skin, tastes
with her feet.

This poem is not about her,
with fried cobweb hair floating out
from the halo of her cave woman face,

peering through the cracked door,
fish-eyed, tottering, bone chimes.

moth in the attic
come closely to the light
let me let you out

It is not about how she was
like water in my hand
as we stumbled down the stairs
one at a time.
I was a column to lean against,
she was something wild and dying.

This is not about the night the power was cut,
and no soft Christmas lights
lit the staircase railing,

the ones she liked to turn on every evening
even in March.

It is not about what the end will be,
or how they carried her away
to the salmon-brick walls on harbor hill.

It is about,
the moth is gone;

leaving powdery messages
on the window, one her four wings
unhooked and folded like a sheet.
                   
          ***

for Carol

T.L. Stokes
(upcoming in The Gin Bender Review 11/2003)