Remember the time it snowed moths
on New Year’s? That sweltering December
melting into January, a hush of wings
as they settled, cocooning the church,
drifting over the flagstones like dry leaves,
little things borne on a scrap of breeze.
Of course you don’t remember,
because I’m only telling you now.
Something shifted that night.
You said I shouldn’t worry,
gathering their wings from the cracks,
& leaves from in the grass,
pressing them together in pages
which I would open once a month
to watch the veins spreading,
palmate, dry of life, because
you weren’t there & I wasn’t
& neither was the third day
of that year, when the moths,
having died, began to rise up
in bright columns, in beams of heavy air,
off to fill a space where nobody was.
Henry Whittier-Ferguson