Butterflies

It’s a December night, the century’s end, dark and calm,

     draws near.

I slowly read friends’ poems, look at photographs,

     the spines of books.

Where has C. gone? What’s become of bumptious K. and smiling T.?

     What ever happened to B. and N.?

Some have been dead a millenium, while others, debutants, died

     just the other month.

Are they together? In a desert with a crimson dawn?

     We don’t know where they live.

By a mountain stream where butterflies play?

     In a town scented with mignonette?

Die Toten reiten schnell, S. repeated eagerly (he too

     is gone).

They ride little horses in the steppe’s quiet, beneath a round yellow

     cloud.

Maybe they steal coal at a little railroad stop in Asia and melt

     snow in sooty pots

like those transported in freight cars.

     (Do they have camps and barbed wire?)

Do they play checkers? Listen to music? Do they see Christ?

     They dictate poems to the living.

They paint bison on cave walls, begin building

     the cathedral in Beauvais.

Have they grasped the sense of evil, which eludes us,

     and forgiven those who persecuted them?

They wade through an arctic glacier, soft from the August heat.

     Do they weep? Regret?

Talk on telephones for hours? Hold their tongues? Are they here among us?

     Nowhere?

I read poems, listen to the mighty whisper

     of night and blood.