A butterfly landed on my palm
Featured in ‘Sunlight Later’
There is another meltdown, this time over nachos
something to do with sharing or having expected
mayonnaise or simply the general malaise of being two
and human. Later, we exchange cross words as you
fall asleep on the sofa with your phone in your hand
and I say you could have emptied the dishwasher after
emptying it myself in that loudly silent way, slamming
drawers dropping pans stuttering the fuckerings so that you’ll
hear my righteous rage. Later, it rains hot July rain which I get caught
in, jeans slurping to skin, unwashed hair now sticking and dripping
water down my face. It’s always the little things, they say, to feel
grateful for and sometimes it’s the little things that make me
angry too. Later, we go out to breathe the expanded air,
walk the way we always walk to the park. And then I see a
butterfly, a red and black butterfly, and I point to it, not
with my finger but with my palm upturned as if (let’s say)
in prayer. And the butterfly takes its cue and lands
on my palm, stays on my palm, and we all go quiet. Later,
I think about how I could Google Red Admiral, learn some intelligent
fact about how they feed on ivy flowers and how maybe I could write
a poem about this Vanessa Atalanta (if you will) that pulled me
out of my funk, taught me to appreciate the beauty of the moment,
the beauty of the little things. I could describe the underside of her wings
as the colour of a secret bruise, write something about marks of war woven
into a single pulse of peace, explain how my hands were strangely upturned
as if (let’s say) in prayer, confess that she flew off in fleeting fanfare but not before she changed my day around. But no: she stayed a beat too long.
So I shook my hand to thrust her off, disquieted by her vibrant ease,
her capacity to stay. I shook her off, like how sometimes I close the
blinds as the sinking sun catches the edges of the clouds, like how
sometimes I turn from my new baby’s new laugh, like shaking off
a butterfly. A casual backhand to the blaze.
An extra note
This was written after one of ‘those days’. Nothing major goes wrong, but everyone is a bit cross, the toddler-tantrums come thick and fast, it’s muggy and rainy and there just seems to be a lot to feel irritated about. You know the ones!
And, as the poem says, when we were walking back from the park a butterfly landed on my palm and just stayed and stayed there until I eventually shook it off. At first I was like ‘Wow! How amazing, this has made my day!’ and then after a minute or so I was like ‘Ok, but I kind of want to go now, why are you still here?’
As I started writing the poem I could tell it was turning into some kind of simplistic, overly life-affirming piece about how noticing the small and beautiful things can shake us out of our itchiness and irritation. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. I think what this moment was really revealing to me was our general inability as humans to stay present in the moment - both the beautiful and the bad. And in fact, sometimes it is the flashes of grace and wonder that catch us unawares that are the most uncomfortable for us to encounter. It can feel safer to turn away from what they offer and remain in our uncomfortable but familiar funk.