Notes About the Butterflies, the Moth, and the Sadness

I place a small tortoiseshell in a matchbox, beside the three others. It is the saddest matchbox I know. At night, I touch my ear against it. A silence. I believed there was poetry in their nearness. Then they began to die.

*

They sleep in winter, closing their wings into dark slits, as a blizzard turns birches into horse manes and frost hangs diamond earrings on branches where crows huddle in sad nearness. Crows, how to ask forgiveness from the butterflies?

*

When the crows soar, they are dark handkerchiefs women wave out of train windows. They do not wish to be beautiful. To be beautiful is to be a tree watered with the blood of sacrificed animals. They do not answer me from their shimmering, laughing darkness.

*

I have given the funeral boats of the matchboxes to the river.

*

I pick a caterpillar from a brass field and feed it long hairy leaves for days, watching it dine until it braids itself a filigreed fishnet, crawls below it, and waits. For wings to sing out of its body.

*

The week I hear a river boy I loved, and made love to by the river, died, I hear news about the caterpillar, the drinker moth. It too died, locked in a jar without a sky. I go to the bathroom to weep. Poor moth. Poor boy. My responsibility, my responsibility.

*

In autumn, the gardens wilt into rusted birdcages. This is a heavy light, too much for seeing, and the stones of my eyes cover with lichen. It is spoken the soul leaves the mouth of the dead as a moth. It is autumn. I am in a birdcage. I am in his mouth.

Triin Paja is the author of three collections of poetry in Estonian and a recipient of the Betti Alver Literary Award, the Juhan Liiv Poetry Prize, and the Värske Rõhk Poetry Award. Her English poetry has received a Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is appearing in Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.