Butterfly Death by Gina Franco

Butterfly, Death

by Gina Franco

Death of a Butterfly, oil/canvas, 7x8 feet

But a number of things remain

to be crossed. While your flesh

was in my mouth—while the flesh

was yet between their teeth—your flesh

between, in, through

my lips, I sought a word

with you to reconcile ends

to days, and hush to days; love

to days and grounds

to days; tales—gripped, ghostly—to days

I spend telling myself I can’t tell

and I can’t tell: what is it? Between us,

time, dreams: flight: the tongue

in the mouth curls: while,

while, parallel the while. While one

day the glass looks out on butterflies

again: some rash recurring plague—

black, red—flings its winged

feelered fingers against the backlit

screens of my house. It scratches, it grates,

in my sleep again. All driven

from the too open fields, one nervous

swarm homeward, all at once, one: all:

the underside of a single insect

caught in the sill where the sill

ends, collects, draws my eye

to his coiled stiff tongue. I

breath; it wags: ah, this is

not what I meant. I am proboscis,

sucking organ, nectar prick,

at last, of course, spitting death,

for I am vain matter: On the inner angle

of the hind-wing is a well-marked

eyespot, and the hind-wing terminates

in a distinct “tail.” Too much my eyes,

having lost my tail, I am jealous

child. I pluck them from trees. I walk

my secret box—ghost leaves, fat

thoraces, monarchs—into my closet: veins,

sky inside them, inside the box

I close.

I am old.

You no longer daunt me, wild old

man, my Swedenborg honey.

From the beginning pre-beginning,

oh state before states before birth

generation change challenge: nothing,

really,

I’m onto you. The status of the one—

Dovelike sat’st brooding on the vast

abyss and mad'st it pregnant—

"The status of the one is paradoxical and apparently contradictory: as the very principle of singleness, it has no plurality, no number."...........Paul de Man

Intro

Portfolio Directory

I am jealous god unbelievably

sleeping. In the desert a hawk

swoops between my eyelids (closed

over my squat body) and eyes, and I

long to follow him over the hills

before me. I fly, helium, along cliff

faces, sand, across the Southwest

into the East, reckless, rash,

impatient, fearlessly crossing the ocean,

east, into the cities, into the broad

ways, and desert, seeking him

who my body craves, every minute

fearing loss, until I reached

for a boulder and clung: solidity, end

of dream, loss of flight, unless

rock floats too—forgetting him—

I woke in layers, first gripping

a mirror in sleep, then waking full,

I gripped my own chest.

I cross, I migrate. The blaze

by night is hysterical: red,

black : Correa paints his Death

of a Butterfly in the light

of my rooms. He paints

my fixtures lined with dust, skin,

paint chips, insect parts

and insect wholes, and I catch

sight of the mouth—I burnt

among them, and consumed them

that were in the uttermost parts—

the mouth, a very great plague,

in my mouth: vacuum.

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