Fortnightly Poem 7.A (Featured)

This fortnight’s poem is by one of my favourite contemporary poets – Canadian Lorna Crozier. It’s from her 2011 book Small Mechanics.

Obsession Lorna Crozier

I think moth and the Miller moth

appears. Out of my mind

it sits on the kitchen windowpane

between pieces of smutty wings

I’ve smashed on the glass.

What would Issa do? He who told

the spiders they had nothing to fear—

he kept house poorly. He was

also wise and Buddhist; knew spiders

do their work quietly, alone.

I’ve done my best to see

this moth’s large extended family

as things of use or beauty;

winter blossoms in an empty house,

fertile clots of earth sprouting legs and wings,

leaving the kind of trail

dirt would leave if it crawled

momentarily up a window

or fell between plates on a white cloth.

I try to think of its feelers as curled

eyelashes on a sweet-faced boy,

as two delicate pubic hairs

a lover might leave on the sheets.

This moth could’ve been cut

from the wool of Raskolnikov’s long coat—

a ragged repentant from another realm

sent to stay the murderer in me