"Why does a farmer shoot a six-foot butterfly, a hiker asks."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Halfway
Across the south yard evening
Ellen, on the sofa, listens
A woman rises to wired windows,
Ellen strokes Sissela's hand
She keeps a diary and calls it living.
After supper she lingers in her room,
Later her arm droops, spent, _______________________________________________________________ Near Ellensburg
In astral lamp light, Jotul-warm,
She listens to the Jotul green wood
She and he, companions now,
Near Ellensburg, in a small pasture cemetery,
Remembrances too big to hold in their arms
Remembrances so big, that they caress, _______________________________________________________________ Mother Visits
Her longing for smell brought her back
She understands she is dead.
"Did anyone see FDR arrive by limousine
Mother asks me to stroke her shoulders, wet
"Talk to me so the darkness will lift."
Near her grave, the boughs _______________________________________________________________ Six-Foot Butterfly
It lies by the edge of a canyon. Marigold, ocher orange, brittlebush, onyx-striped. At
dusk, it flames. Hikers camp near it, warm tins of beans over it. Nearby villagers
name it angel, glowworm, UFO. Then a farmer shoots it. An entomologist is called.
Why does a farmer shoot a six-foot butterfly, a hiker asks. Dislikes gossamer? Rush
of air, whirl of sand when it lifts at dawn? Shifts, resettles. The entomologist does
not know. Examines, identifies it as western tiger swallowtail. Body soft as sable, as
black. Dry wing tips midnight blue. Can't distinguish the gunshot wound from its
markings in the dark. Why does a farmer shoot a six-foot butterfly, a villager asks.
Misidentifies it as tussock moth? The entomologist does not know. He lies alongside it.
Between his fingertips, its wings tear into blossoms.
_______________________________________________________________
a woman waves from a window.
Her wrist bleeds.
to Sissela, from a land of women
with nightgowns on fire.
talks about the father of her baby.
picks dead lice from her hair,
but really she longs to write,
not listen to a fuck-up's story.
smoking meth, reading A Room Of One's Own,
writing love notes to Charles Bukowski.
among the folds of her skirt.
She looks out across the south yard evening.
she reads of houses emptied after death,
impressions of life beyond her wrists,
of middle-aged children carrying out
candelabra, Bristol vases, paintings
their parents purchased together.
fire and him showering, smells coffee brewing,
and she mistakes Puget Sound, outside the window,
for pink sky breaking the paper-white and gray.
have known Ballard winter nights
sharing Richard Hugo and James Welch passages.
Summer afternoons stopping
in Hoh River Valley
to examine licorice ferns crowning cedars
at the shore, they mistake the calls of cormorants
and petrels nesting in the sea stacks
for the voices of sea lions.
she mistakes a lamb's cry for a human mother's
over her dead child. The solitary opening,
permits her--and him--to glimpse her mother busy
even in death bathing her sister.
like vases or paintings, remembrances like
chrysanthemums spilling along a chipped brick path
when the rampant hollyhocks and roses
shrouded the picket fence. She would run
past her dead sister's toy desk
to a hollow beneath the wisteria
in the rank back garden
and listen to neighbor children buy chocolate
from the singing sidewalk candy man,
tinkling bells sewn to his shirt.
suggest how long it takes to love, how long
it takes to stop touching, stop wanting to touch.
to Hixville. North & South, Questions of Travel.
She talks of her three-day trip to Key West, how
standing at the gate of Bishop's White Street,
she believed she could identify origins
by journeying far from her territory.
for his postmaster's burial? Did anyone
see me at age seventeen waiting for Eleanor
in the Civil War heroes' circle?"
her lips with strawberries and grapes.
Her vault is sealed with epoxy.
Her casket is locked, her mouth sewn shut.
break over infant headstones.
The stone angel is blue in the cold.
Snowflakes drop through her hand
shaped to carry a pansy bouquet.