We wake together, discovering the garden
Has gone to sleep around us, the sky dead black.
We've nearly forgotten
The when and where of love that brought us here
And left us near sundown, the why and how of our lives
At the familiar strange beginning of night.

The moths are hovering at the shadows of flowers,
Engrossed by their blurred labors, some zigzagging
Wildly, cross-purposefully,
And some in whorls like nebulae, constellations
Unstrung from the belt of their small zodiac
To fade and waver down into the grass.

And sweeping by, the bats are taking others
Silently and carefully into silence.
A nighthawk, the backswept
Outlines of its wings dark crescent moons,
Swoops near again and again. The moths vanish,
Reappear and vanish, die, spin back transformed.

And we lie under this feast like part of it,
Not wishing ourselves the sure wings of the hunters
But, lighter than feathers,
The baffling erratic uncontrollably crooked
Night bearing gifted star-marked wings of the hunted
Whose tongues, like ours, go spiraling into sweetness.