Almost a year now

Almost a year now
Stephen Sexton

       I have let the butterfly be

on the floor of my childhood bedroom. The MDF

has bubbled in the heat where the sun,

prosecuting its duties, bores into it each afternoon

and leaches what’s left of amber and ochre

from the painted lady’s dorsal side.

It’s been dead ten times longer than it was alive.

Insectivorous things – shiny beetles, ants by the colony –

might have, I should think, borne it away piece by piece

as I have done my father’s clothes in bin bags

to the tilt-chute of the textile bank,

but they have either moved on too – perished

with the autumn or the winter – or they’re inclined

to treat the body as I do: with morbid curiosity,

as if it were a kind of demigod; one of the cherubim.

I shush the hoover at the threshold of that room,

where lint recompacts into something material,

and study for a moment each new degradation:

how the olivescent abdomen has withered,

how the wingtips have furred with a steel-blue dust

not unlike the swarf that accrues on the edge of a knife

when it’s ground against the whetstone; what molts off

to give the blade its burr. All the keener for being less.

Sunday mornings, invariably, I find myself

sharpening knives next to the sink, just before noon

when the sun arrives at such an angle of incidence

the good light falls between our neighbours’ houses.

And I must confess this: once, years ago, not long after

we were married, we were chased room to room for a week

by the same butterfly, lost on its vast migration.

It jittered, weaved, crashed into clocks and ficuses,

struck each of us in the face. It would not leave.

We switched off every lamp, opened the kitchen window,

took a torch outside and lured it into the darkness.

I was a second moon that night, or a near star,

or whatever tricked the thing’s magnetic compass

and drew it out into the cold. How long,

had we let it stay, might it have lain in our house

weirdly preserved? Longer than you think. Almost forever

in the formaldehyde of metaphor, but that is by the by.

It’s the real thing I’m thinking of, which lies in the room

I dreamed in, among orphic teenage artefacts:

a single bed, a lava lamp, CDs in their wooden rack.

The house is so quiet now there’s no one living there.

Every few weeks I come to make a little noise, observe

the body – such a heavy word for so slight a thing –

lying in state. No longer can its wings inaugurate hurricanes

along Hurricane Alley, if you believe in that kind of thing.

And if you do, perhaps the inverse is also true: the little

that happens here is littler still somewhere far away.

 

© Stephen Sexton