Year of the Snake

White Butterfly

65 White Butterfly The cicadas are shy and hard to find tonight, as always, even though their music is tangible, like heat. It presses shrill and strong against the skin, pulls me upright , and makes my pulse flower again. Red dragonflies slither free from molted shells, roll enormous glittering eyes and lick their glistening tails. The bola spider will pull a single line of silk from her round creamy-orange bottom—she jewels it with beads of perfume that smell like the musk of a female moth, and then swings her thread like a bright pearl lasso above her head until a male moth, brave with lust, flies into the spiral snare of her twirling rope and is wrapped quick and neat as a fatted calf. And when the time has come for you to close your eyes and shed your shell of muscle, 66 blood, and bone, I’ll come to you in the form of a white butter- fly. I’ll ride in on the back of a black dragonfly with wings laced as intricately as a Spanish mantilla, and when breath becomes lonely in the bare dusky chamber of your rib cage, I will flutter above the cool void of your mouth, uncurl the sinewy, incense-like coil of my tongue and reach deep inside you, as if you were honeysuckle, rescue your last breath from the brittle carapace of your body, and then fan it with swift powerful beats of my wings until it opens up and breaks free—the way the cloudy heads of dandelions gone to seed escape the green anchors of their stems. Then you can drift past the purple borders of cosmos, red Gerber daisies with their velvet plush-button centers, the white and yellow spicy points of chrysanthemums in your garden, 67 past the grave of the woman I used to be, which you tended for so many years, to the river where rice paper lanterns will spill their yellow glow onto the water like bright splashes of pottery glaze as they are set into the slow, deep pull of the current to float downstream during obon—the chain of light unfolding and uncoiling like a shimmering gold serpent. Remember the memory of this light and follow it wherever it leads you, because you are all spirit, breath, and seed now. I will come with you and show you. I will take you home. ...