Jennifer By Moonlight

A cricket with a short circuit
whirs in grass behind a stone.

The dark electric sound
seems to shine,

attracting our daughter with her
mouthful of moth-wings

toward the porch's edge
where she teeters

on her hands and knees, inarticulate,
and stares.

When a second cricket sizzles
like a star

dunked in a dipper,
she giggles first,

then jabbers at the moon perched
on our Ford.

Carelessly it spills its light
like milk across the yard.

Absorbed
in what she cannot comprehend,

our speechless lady pouts,
vexed

by this brief innocence
of crickets singing and the moon.

William Pitt Root