Six short lines, three couplets, not a single punctuation mark, and yet the poem sets the whole of time against one small insect. It begins with eternity ("infinite crow of time") and ends with a modest, almost shrugging phrase, "have just a while." Between those two poles sits a moth, and a quiet argument about love.
The opening couplet is a pair of images with no verbs to hold them together. "Night desert" is a stage direction, a place named and left empty. "Crow" is the strange choice. It could be the bird, black like the night around it, or the cry of a rooster, the old sound that marks the passing hours. The poem doesn't say, and the doubt helps it. In either reading, time has a voice here, harsh and endless, sounding over a landscape with nobody in it. "Infinite" makes that voice sound inescapable.
The title does a lot of hidden work. Without it, "moth" is just a moth. With it, the poem points to a real piece of natural history: the yucca plant and the yucca moth depend on each other, since the moth pollinates the flower and its young then feed on the plant's seeds. That is outside knowledge, but it makes the middle couplet richer. "If love takes every turn / to find a moth" can then be read almost literally, as a plant and an insect bound so closely that each needs the other to continue. The phrase "every turn" suggests winding paths, wrong guesses, a moth's wavering flight in the dark. Love here is not a gentle feeling but a long, patient search that tries every bend. Notice too that love is the subject and the moth is what it hunts for. The grammar makes something as fragile and fleeting as a moth the prize.
Then comes the pivot. "If" demands a "then," and the poem supplies one, but not a logical one. We expect a conclusion like "then surely love can find me." What we get is "then I with my heart / have just a while." The syntax is unusual. "I with my heart" splits the speaker in two, as though the self and its heart were travelling companions, or as though the heart were a possession carried along. And "just a while" can be read two ways. It may be a lament that if love must work this hard, a human life is too short for it. Or it may be a kind of acceptance: a while is enough, as it is for the moth, whose own time in the desert night is brief. The poem lets both readings stand.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no strict metre, but a long "i" threads through it: "infinite," "time," "night," "find," "I," "my," "while." The vowel returns at the key moments, in the vast words (time, night) and the small, personal ones (I, my, while), so the huge and the tiny seem to ring against each other. The lines are very short, and the shortest, "to find a moth" and "have just a while," are the ones that land the poem's two ideas. "Moth" itself is a soft, hollow-sounding word, and the poem stops soon after it, with no full stop, so that it fades more than it ends. That fits a poem about how little time we have.
What makes it worth reading is the way it handles scale without announcing it. It never says "we are small" or "life is short"; it sets "infinite" beside "a while" and trusts the reader to feel the gap. The conditional form ("if... then") gives it the shape of an argument, but the conclusion is emotional rather than logical, and that is where it stays human. In a handful of words it turns a desert insect into a way of thinking about love, patience and the shortness of a life. The ending is also generous. Love may take every turn, time may crow without end, and the speaker still claims the little that he has.