Moths
There are moths around the cupboard
There is lamb in the oven.
Call them a swarm if you like:
Cruel and unloving are those who fill their houses
With shut doors shudderingly caressed.
The lamb is in the oven and has the smell
Of complacently falling autumn rain;
The swarm becomes a stain if we
Don’t do something about them; whose beating of wings
Beating against the cupboard door
Will get them nowhere:
They hover, rain is hovering
Acridly roast lamb perfumed
Above all this parched scorched waterlogged ghost ground.
Above days picked apart in delicate paper curtain wings:
We must delicately cohabit.
My skin used to shrink when moths landed
On it; as cooking meat
Shrinks to itself, water abandoning; as the
Moths return to me now with
The tenderness of cars to evening driveways
As wings shudderingly shrink together.
Sticky legged is
Our wallowing in our giving in,
Our passion’s burning;
Our lamb
Oven-roasted oven cremated
Our prime Agnus Dei.