Six lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and one word of title: "Molt" is a poem in which almost everything is left for the reader to work out. It never says who is shedding what, or why the speaker is alone with winter. The most useful thing it gives us is the title itself. To molt is to cast off a skin, feathers or shell, and it leaves the creature exposed until something new grows in. The three couplets read like three states of that process: a silence, a flash of bare life, and a hardness.
The first couplet is all stillness. "Winter settling in my mouth" makes winter something that falls and gathers, like snow or silt, and it lands in the mouth, the organ of speech, taste and breath. The speaker is being quieted from the inside. The short line that follows, "still and sad," does the work of a held breath. "Still" means both motionless and continuing, so the sadness is a settled condition, not a passing mood. Sound reinforces this. "Settling," "still" and "sad" all begin with the hushed hiss of an s, so the lines seem to quiet themselves as they go.
Then the poem turns sharply to "you dancing / raw in the world." The poem doesn't say who "you" is, and it is wiser to leave that open than to guess. What matters is the contrast. After stillness comes movement, and "raw" is the word that connects most directly to the title. Raw can mean skinned, tender, unprotected, newly exposed, which is exactly how a molting creature looks and feels. Yet this rawness is dancing, not cowering. The line also gives "in the world" to the other person and leaves the speaker's mouth full of winter. One of them is out in the open and the other has withdrawn.
The last couplet is the strangest. "This first night that I ever / lie with a stone" has an odd grammar, with a present-tense "lie" tucked inside a phrase that sounds like looking back. That slight wrongness may be deliberate. The line break after "ever" leaves the word hanging, as if the speaker is stepping into a new kind of time, a "first" that might be followed by many more. The phrase "lie with" carries intimacy, and sometimes sleep or death. Here the companion is a stone, cold and inert, the opposite of a raw, dancing body. Judging by the imagery, we might read it as a substitute for human closeness, or as a sign that the speaker is turning hard and silent. The poem doesn't choose between these, and the doubt is part of its effect.
The structure helps. Each couplet pairs a longer line with a shorter one: seven syllables then three, three then four, seven then four. Read aloud, these lines tend to open and then close, like a person starting a sentence and thinking better of it. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, so nothing tidies the feeling. But the poem does echo itself in sound. The s of "settling," "still" and "sad" returns in the final word, "stone," which begins with the same st that opens "still." The poem ends on the hardest, most final-sounding word it has, and the stone seems to be where the winter in the first line has been heading.
What makes "Molt" worth reading is how much it asks of so few words. The title turns the poem into a question: whose molt is this? The dancing "you" is the obvious candidate, raw from shedding something. But the speaker may be molting too, and the stone may be what remains when the old self falls away and the new one hasn't arrived. The poem works by leaving out what happened and trusting its images to carry the feeling, and that is why it stays in the mind. A reader can finish it in seconds and then spend much longer wondering which of the two figures, the one dancing or the one lying beside a stone, is really the one who has been changed.