On that hot summer evening, I was walking down the stairs to return a book of poems by Tomas Tranströmer to K., who was waiting for me in the living room, when I saw an exquisite butterfly: some unknown chalk like white, dark velvet black with two crimson streaks on the upper side of the forewings. That’s all I could see before I took a turn to take the next set of stairs, with that turn also came an old haiku I had read on Twitter where a blossom returning to its bough is mistaken for a butterfly, I thought I must see it again because who knows when again. I turned and saw the butterfly breaking, broken into fragments.
Last night in my dream, I ended the email to my dead grandmother with Anna’s question:
Now that you’re there, where everything is known—tell me:
What else lived in that house besides us?
(for A.)
Beyond Six Rivers 