Beyond the last
Two white butterflies flew into view as I stood at the back door. They flapped their wings quickly and lightly over a clump of forget-me-nots that grew around the trunk of a palm tree. And then, perhaps having found a choice feeding or resting place, they fell to and disappeared behind the leaves.
I stayed at the door longer than usual, waiting for the butterflies to reappear. I thought of a friend’s poem, in which he commented on the shortness of the butterfly’s life, which could fill up only two pages—he was alluding to the wings.
When the butterflies took time to reemerge, I was tempted to check if they were still there. But then they showed themselves out again, and like a trill, of piano keys rapidly played, they disappeared behind a wall.
I asked myself, now with not a little amusement, if I was not seeing their ghost. Because, while the butterflies were sucking or napping on a bud, time might have written the last line of their two-page life.
My mind leapt to an account in the Gospel of Luke, when, after he had risen, Jesus stood before the disciples. Two of them had claimed to have earlier walked with Jesus on the road to Emmaus, and recognized him when he broke bread. While they were making the report, lo and behold, there was Jesus in their midst. The disciples were startled and terrified, thinking that they were seeing a ghost. To assuage their fright and doubts, Jesus told them to look at his hands and his feet, and to touch him. “It’s me!” he said. And then he asked for something to eat.
There was only broiled fish, which nonetheless Jesus ate in their presence. Luke only tells us that the disciples were filled with joy and amazement. But I’m sure that they must have laughed, and Jesus himself must have smiled. Deep down, they—all of them—were laughing at the futility of pain and death.
Among the modern poets, I rank Wistawa Szymborska with the very best. She has the genius of capturing the right, evocative image, such as in a poem about a cemetery plot for children, in which she remembers little Zosia, Jacek and Dominik, who died because of an accident or illness, and who, she says, did not have much in their “return baggage”—just “a fistful of air with a butterfly flitting” and “a spoonful of bitter knowledge—the taste of medicine.”
In another poem—about Sept. 11, when two planes attacked the World Trade Center in New York—Szymborska writes of those who jumped from the burning floors, how a photograph halted them in life and now keeps them floating in midair, “above the earth toward the earth,” each of them still complete, with a face, and “with blood well-hidden.”
In the photograph at least, Szymborska says:
There’s enough time
For hair to come loose,
For keys and coins
To fall from pockets.
And then she says, ending the poem:
I can do only two things for them —
describe this flight
and not add a last line.
But by rising from the dead, Jesus continued the last line. He extended the biographies of the little children in the Polish cemetery and those who died on Sept. 11, in fact of all who have died and will die, all of us, by writing beyond the last page. The succeeding pages, no less real than the preceding ones, go on and on. The last line does not belong to Jesus, and those who believe in him—just the last laugh.
