Standing in the front room, unable
to remember why I came here,
perhaps for a notepad, I notice
a butterfly through the old glass
wavy windows, its blue wings wavy,
zig-zagging from bloom to bloom
but never returning to the same one,
and beyond, the golfers, old guys
since it’s mid-morning mid-week
and they don’t have to work
moving up the eighteenth fairway,
sometimes hitting an oak
but generally progressing to the green
where long ago God appeared
to the evangelist, now dying in a hospital
in North Carolina but then young,
telling him to preach salvation,
and beyond, the river, sluggish and dark,
its water not knowing where it’s going
but always heading toward the sea.
