Swallowtails
The Emperor thought of his
heart as a water wheel
flooding the rice fields of all
creation
and bloodied the water for a
better harvest.
His warriors hoped for a
life with wings.
His swallowtails wrote him
the same lines
—the secret of life is a
resurrected worm—
He told them eventually time
would run backwards
in their hands, now empty
where a crossbow went.
A theory works if it answers
the exceptions.
The writing in the air of
swallowtails,
from here to where the time
changes at Mexico Beach,
is like writing all the
armies of the afterlife
waiting underground in
China.
We are attuned to shadows.
They strafe the shore.
An osprey spins above the
trees.
But when a large one stops
suddenly above the house,
all the laws have been
broken.
A theory that a moment is a
warehouse where armies are stacked
to the ceiling, then one
falls, is the last exception.
The osprey’s underside is
streaked like a zebra swallowtail.
It misses the fish that dove
out of the reach of shadows
as the lovers jumped into
theirs from the Bay Bridge to Fort Walton.
If any should meet hovering
over a milkweed or reflection,
they might say didn’t I know
you in another life,
the kind of thing said often
in Fort Walton or the Orient
and didn’t plum blossoms
freeze in the Emperor’s courtyard.
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