Two Poems
David Stephenson

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Butterfly

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I woke up from a dream of leaves, and all
was different. I was suspended in
an unfamiliar inelastic skin
which had split open, forcing me to crawl
up to the twig it hung from, lest I fall.
The strangeness of my plight has since set in.
My body has grown monstrously thin
With threadlike legs, on which I sway and sprawl—

but most unsettling is the graceless pair
of structures now unfolding out of me.
They catch the wind, and if they swell much more
I fear a gust will hurl me through the air
toward some unspeakable calamity.
I wonder what on earth they could be for.

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Spider

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Having spun my web, I sit in wait,
a foot upon each strand. Now time will tell
if I have chosen its location well;
if numerous fat flies will meet their fate
as struggling morsels on my sticky plate,
or if but dust and careless drafts will fill
my gaping net and hopeless days, until
I die, and wither, and disintegrate.

My little life is meaningful to me,
but not to the great spider in the sky
who spun the grim stochastic universe.
At least I have no brain, and cannot be
condemned by consciousness to wonder why,
to grasp at purpose. That would be a curse.

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​David’s notes: “I wrote these poems in 2005 or so. At that time I was working for General Motors, and although I’d been there twenty years I was thinking about quitting, because the place was falling apart and it was depressing to go in. The poems people write reflect what they’re thinking about, and in my case these poems expressed some concern about making a big change, but also about sitting tight and relying on fate to continue supplying me with flies to eat, metaphorically. In the end the butterfly won out and I quit, although I got back into the car business a few years later, since it turned out the grass wasn’t any greener elsewhere.

“‘Butterfly’ first appeared in The Lyric, and ‘Spider’ in a defunct journal called Iambs & Trochees; both are in my first collection, Rhythm and Blues.“

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David Stephenson is a retired manufacturing engineer from Detroit, and the editor of Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. His new collection is Secret Dance.

 

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