Butterfly or Bird

~ for P. K. Page, January 14, 2010

There, in that uncertain place
between the shadows of —
what are they? birches, or
something like; a kind of
once into and through those words
we casually recognized:
“I
was in Brazil in the ‘50s also,
but a bit before you, I guess,
and not for so long.”
Those words
or, well, something like them,
pieces almost familiar enough
to fit together again when
this stranger passes unnoticed as
a small air upon my wrist,
weightless, on this Thursday of
the first week in Ordinary Time.

~ Allan Brown

Poet’s note: I met P.K twice — once briefly at a reading she gave at Queen’s University in the late 1980s, and then about ten years later at UVic where we had a delightful half hour or so conversation about places and people, poetry and other things. In the days after her death, pieces of our talk, and especially her voice in “At Sea,” came together and I wrote the poem. I have adapted a few phrases from P.K.’s “At Sea” (Evening Dance of the Grey Flies) — the title, “a stranger,” “weightless upon my wrist.”

Allan Brown’s 20th volume of poetry, the on-line chapbook Sentences (Coracale Press), appeared in January, 2009. His twenty-first volume of poetry, the 11-part sequence “Excursions” was published by Alfred Gustav Press in November 2009.

Read more of Allan Brown’s poetry:
Four Haiku
Between Seasons
Two Haiku
Three Haiku
Seeings
Todesfuge

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