Mi madre, the widow, she grows
butterfly bushes in front
of our dead-end house, to start
a collection, colored shapes
of wings and eyes to put
behind glass, hang
on the wall - sadism
made beautiful. Twenty years
those bushes have grown
and though they come,
the mariposas, fluttering lives,
she has yet to find
los caídos to perpetuate
her hobby. Her shelves are full
of dust and ghosts. But then
where should we go
to recover the wisps
of dreams long dead?
I stare at the wings
pinned to my wall,
a Mardi Gras mask, a butterfly
in dark and wilted feathers,
the mimicry no more
alive than the original,
like the pipevine caught
and Christed in a display case.
The feathers stir in stale
air currents, remembered
flight - the bird, their former
home, as much a fiction now
as the enigmatic figure such
green-black tufts used to
personify, as the person
I once thought I knew
myself to be. Age
has turned daring matador;
the muleta is gone and
I am face-to-face
with its pins.

04/15/2005

Author's Note: Another imitation for my poetry class, again of Rane Arroyo, same as in El Vuelo. Hence the random spanish terms. Mariposa means butterfly, but it is also slang for a homosexual (Arroyo is gay), and is also a move used by matadors in bullfighting where they cease using the cape (muleta) as distraction and face the bull head on. Los caídos = the fallen ones. A pipevine swallowtail is a type of butterfly that has green-black wings, sort of. I kind of like this one.

Posted on 04/15/2005
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