Thick furry balaclava’d neck.
Shaggy charcoal pelt.
A cream hairstreak, wings fringed
with cork, and feathery
snow-shoes on its head.
It came in a gale –
fooled by a moony lamp –
and stayed a week
on the sill outside
the chair you’d take.
With gale after gale
more of the moth
was lost, antennae first.
Scales flaked like pixels,
quilted your brain cells –
a patchwork of negative space.
By the end of the week
the moth wore its wings
off the shoulder
like the net of dropped stitches
in an old punk mohair jumper.
You could see through
to the parsnip curl of naked thorax;
only knew it was alive
because it hadn’t moved at all,
it had clung for so long
at your glowing impassable threshold.
