thaddius

1. I am in love with Alison Luterman's poetry
2. Don't get to go dancing this weekend like I planned
3. I was attracting all kinds of critters and insects yesterday. I hummingbird did a fly-by near my ear, a bee too a long rest on my stomach, a butterfly chilled on my hand, etc. Weird
4. Hung out with a friend I hadn't seen in a few years. So much fun.
5. Took some photos out at Talache..and got a bunch of bug bites, but it was fun.

Messenger

The butterfly's wings were more complex
than an embroidered lampshade for the Empress.
It opened and closed them like applause.
It was obsessed

with a dessicated lump of dogshit, it
fluttered and hovered and would not let go, the way--
oh, stop this metaphor. It was feeding, that's all.

I was sad because my lover had left.
Ruth was saying all the perfect, useless things.

My mother was still alive in snowbound Massachusetts.
A part of me thought she'd hang on forever,
making slurred phone calls from her wheelchair,
and struggling to get the towels lined up straight.
It's not like my father and sister didn't

try to warn me. It's just that we can't believe
what we don't see in front of us.
Unfolding green chenille of the far hills.

I could have gazed forever at this butterfly, the gorgeousness
of its rapt attention to dirt,
how it struggled
for one day's worth of nourishment.

There were dizzying spaces
where the hills dropped away that made me want to leap
out into the void.
Sun stretched its fringey springtime parasol.
Turkey vultures dipped and circled,
and I had to admit I was happy
in spite of it all. We didn't know

my mother would die the next week,
or where the too-early butterfly had come from.
The depth of our ignorance was splendid,

and the message was not in code.
Because everything
everything! comes flying or fluttering or crashing
toward us with its own illogical beauty,
its already-torn wings.

The Largest Possible Life
for Ruth and Gladys

Building a fire, love;
bent low
over a flame

I am afraid of.
Coaxing passion
from dry twigs

and dead leaves,
the failures of the past, dirty fingers,
and a moment of sunset

huge orange
hangs in one eye--
in my breast a sun

which, if I could see it, if I could
know it, would
light the world

with love. Then,
an unexpected memory
of my mother in the car, snow piled

along the gray streets
of Massachusetts. It was my sixteenth year
and we were fighting a life

and death struggle over my desire to give
myself away completely to love before
I had a self to give.

There she was, my block, my barricade,
my iron grate, my broken door--our one shared
passion, to hurt each other into truth, and

it was the millionth skirmish
of our everyday war when she said
"I don't know if I've ever loved anyone,"

and began to weep. Monks sit
in the middle of fires
they set themselves. They let


their bodies bloom
into suffering,
in the hope that, like this, they will open

someone's heart.
What do we have to
see, how close do we need to live by the

beautiful terrible flame of this world,
flame of ourselves, which is
the same thing?

How much anguish do we need to pour
from cup to cup, drink of melted rubies,
underwater food of the fevers that live

in our blood, in the light of our eyes
where infinite tears are waiting and still
you say, "Light a white candle," and I do, asking

whoever it is, Teach me to surrender
this mind that grasps at shadows
when the whole house is ablaze, when the only thing left

is to leap, carrying the impossible
weight in my arms, into
the heart of our fire, to melt and to bloom.

~Alison Leuterman