Dragonfly Summer

midsummer   they creak open

paneled wings    flicker-bright


           hints of turquoise & cochineal

           tilting into the wind


Da Vinci’s flying machines

trust given over to sun & light


the thin


bright band of prairie horizon


          they appear


like open sky in a life bereft

unknown                    until that moment


of crinoline wings & sudden lifting

          as hope unfolds its brilliant scales


          out of the summer mud

                     & is born

The Blue Hour

                        for Sharon

this land sees through you


knows what is broken

before you bring your bones

    limping & freighted


poplar teaches

what it is to live

circumscribed

    thirty years or heart rot

a scattering of daughters

pushing up from the roots


the way frost

prepares the ground

for summer flax

    hunches stones out

     eases the tilth


front field opening

like a vein or    sky


tells you plainly of

the core of things

earth baring

its blue curve of marrow

The Stove Wren

          (after Claudia Emerson’s “Waxwing”)

A skitter of claws in the chimney flue,

 she plummets into the stove box,

  angles a breadth of wing against the glass.


On any other night but this,

 she’d have made her plunge

  to a fire laid and lit,


sap-thick tamarack, patient birch,

 or chafed her death unnoticed

  in the cold ash of a deserted room.


Her unexpected entrance

 thwarts the baffles, iron and firebrick.

  Ash-blind, she trusts my hands,


tympani of small claws, heart

 a racing pocketwatch against

  the slim feathers of her breast.


She seizes the rainwashed air

 with all her wings, leaves my hands

  empty, fingertips burning


with ash,

 with absence. The true

  measure of her leaving



that small space

 once cupped and thrumming

  between my palms.

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© Copyright, 2015, Jenna Butler.
All Rights Reserved.