BLACK WITCH MOTH

The moth lifts its dress and everything beneath

its hem’s shadow sings—the grasses where lie

the dead bull and flies skating across its still-

open eyes, its mouth crusted over with clover

and spit while the maggots swim their

patient circuits where the bull’s genitals

have rotted and dropped their bells. The moth

slips through gnat-swarmed air onto the bull’s hooves

and flies past the bull’s corpse, beyond the outskirts

of the barnyard. No dust from the moth’s pleats—

opening and closing—drops onto the dead

animal’s choir. A boy sees its black dress bob

above him, sees in its shadow an angel to call his own.

Let a sudden finish overcome him wherever

the wild shadow lies flat its news, lies motionless

its wingdom among the barnyard grass.

Let the earth take in the boy as it will the bull.

And the worm-work done unto him as unto the bull.

His color gone and bone given into an end

making permanent the final pose of his suffering,

crux into crux his body returning into itself

as though into the first cell that split

until skin, until marrow, until muscle, until the maggot

is king over body. Let the boy’s skin be a tearing,

to see it torn from him and wonder how

then wonder how far until the next time, the next boy.

The moth flashes open its dress then not,

flash then not, flaps over the dead boy, its shadow

moving up his thigh to the hip, to the torso,

lifting its garment across his nakedness.

And the bull into the earth. And the boy into the earth.

And the earth not full, the earth not full.