Where Is My Golden Butterfly

 by Brett Rutherford

1

I am deep into the unforgiving heart
of Latin Lucretius: De rerum naturum.
“Where is my golden butterfly?” you ask.
I close the book. Together we search
the tabletop, the floor, the window-box.
“Oh, it has fluttered off, and now is free.” —
“Keep looking,” you say, “for I fear the worst.”

Next to the pantry door, it hovers there,
now paralyzed, atop a dusty web.
“Set it free!” you cry concernedly.
“It is too late,” I say, “for even now
the black spider has already kissed it;
its orb and legs already spin its shroud.
Its wing-beat gone, it has no power now
to escape the poisoner’s cruel caprice.”

With broom I pull the whole mess down,
and do not chide your neglect of dusting,
as not just one, but twelve subsidiary
webs, each with its own arachnid tenant,
collapse into a nebula of death.
You do not speak, your trembling arm extends
a pointed finger to the out-of-doors.
And so your favorite thing, now dead-alive,
drops down into the ice-fringed compost heap.

 

2

My dreams, so many levels deep these days
are full of others’ unhappiness,
not my own memories in Freud’s jumble,
but all the sad domestic misfortunes,
work rivalries, the sting of sociopath
bosses, days jailed in false arrest, theft-loss,
the broken promises, abandonments,
the blame for crimes you didn’t even think
to do, but everyone assumed you did
because you are so not like the others,
cop-stopped, or grabbed by men in an alley,
when they barred the door, or showed you to it,
said things behind your back you full well heard.
This is what your dreams are made of these days,
not the good sex you’ve had; not one prayer
spread out like a Sunday picnic blanket.

I dream, ten levels down, and cannot leave.
Not one of these events happened to me.
They are spattered by other sleepers tied
in the webs of coma: they broadcast out
as their attendants turn them, fill their veins
with sugar and salt, air bellowed in-out
as their suspended-animation thoughts
cascade into the cosmos. Had I not
the strength of lucid dreaming, I would be
on the brink of my own madness.

Yet I have learned from this a truth profound:
the mind blanks over pain, and even death
and loss. The people have one thing only
that cannot be taken from them: their pride,
an angry wound whose only medicine
is justice, served cool and implacable.

As the rose before the buffeting frost,
the butterfly too beautiful to die,
is turned and bound by the indifferent spider,
all nature screams to me: unfair! unjust!

 

3

You have lost your golden butterfly,
and now I cannot read Lucretius.
I am thinking how good it felt, that one
small efficacious burst of power,
when I trampled black spiders underfoot,
and there seemed to be, for just one moment,
that … much … less … evil abroad in the world.