Erin Pushman "Sugar Creek" Midsentence
"Finish your thought," said the teacher,
because, in midsentence, surprising
myself more than anyone else,
I had stopped speaking
when I noticed the butterflies balanced
aloft on the petals of language, suspended
in air between adjectives, each
adequate as an answer but not exactly
the specimens offered me: trays
of swallowtails, painted ladies....
And however I chose to continue, it couldn't have matched
the thousands of eyes in the faceted, multiple eye
of the viceroy searching the prairies, it couldn't have said
how the mourning cloak sipped from the lilies or conjured the swarm
of sulphurs described in our textbook, forming a cloud
six hundred feet high off the coastline of Argentina;
it couldn't have answered the question. For here was the skipper
who followed us over the playground, the buckeye who floated
over the channels of clover, the monarch who reigned
with the rose in my grandmother's garden, and how could I keep them
moving their scale-spangled wings while instead I was holding
the horror she'd passed through the classroom: the balsa-lined trays,
the tiny gold pins through their bodies? How could I name them—
pearly eyes, metalmarks, hairstreaks, American coppers—
and actually speak of their meaning? Instead I was standing
abstracted and foolish, for hovering over my head
in the branches of thought there were flickerings, brilliant commotions
of weather, antennae and wings, of marshes and woodlands
and meadows astir with migrations, magnificent systems
to carry them back to themselves if only I had
the words to describe them in motion, the words to release them.