Jim Hodge
Moth on a Step
No idea, whatsoever, why this morning,
when I stepped outside into vengeful heat,
and dodged a solitary moth on the porch step,
that I thought of you.
Perhaps it was remembrances of photos you have sent?
A gray Eastern Wood Peewee on a grey Beech,
more stone than fibre, standing sentinel.
Clearly a Corinthian, crowned in Sugar Maple,
and not Acanthus.
Or perhaps it was more a feeling of small feet on layered slate,
bathed in the headwaters of the Cuyahoga, surrounded in bladder fern,
cushioned by obliging Helodium.
None-the-less, there I was staring at a grey moth that sought the shade,
that surely thought, ‘I can do that… I can do cement’, and then she did.