Moth Poem by Kevin Kiely

The error is to see you numerically:
6 legs,2 antennae and (retractable aerial)
the tongue long as a limb. Your folded

wings are a blue sail with black flecks
on the sere-glass ocean of window
punctuation point eyes and furry

garment; you walk, while you see all
or nothing at all. What flitting jolting
chaotic gravitational landing, and more

narrow leaps and loops beyond
aeronautics. How easy to see you
as subatomic, with inner organs

part particle physics and a beautiful
line of algebra, your digestion a
textbook of equations. You flit again

to the window-wood with legs: a delicate
handwriting that walks: illegible almost
erased except for the watercolour petal

of your fin which could not sustain the
scent of a breeze: you tick and throb
drilling delicately for some crumb beyond

my vision, perhaps some wood sap only
available to you for drinking.The sun's
rays do not obliterate you. Do you sweat

and overheat? Rest high flyer I can not look
down on you. We can not touch except
at what level? Fleeting friend, when I leave

the room and return later you will be gone
gone where I do not know, less than a
microscope knows in real terms, that is
in the essentials, the answers.