Poems by Jessica Kulynych

Butterfly Faith

by Jessica Kulynych

From Canary Summer 2020

Jessica lives in the Farmington River Valley, tucked between the exposed bedrock of West Mountain and the sheer traprock of the Metacomet Ridge.

It has been a delightful day, but I am worried, for I suspect this one will not survive. I pull the worn wooden chair away from the table and sink into the seat. Leaning forward, I rest my elbows on the scratched surface of the maple tabletop, palms together, fingertips just grazing my lips. I’m not praying, just watching, staring at the finespun pupa dangling from the canopy inside the butterfly cage. Ebony and orange wings are visible through the paper-thin chrysalis that has, over time, transformed from a jade green, gold-beaded jewel to this delicate transparent skin. Another butterfly emerged early this morning, breaking through the onionskin and unfolding its majestic wings. My children watched with delight.

We don’t pray at our house. We have no sanctified texts to explain the mysteries of the universe. Instead, we, like Thoreau, take to the woods. I have carried all three of my children into the woods. In the womb, in an infant carrier, in a backpack, toddling along, these walks are as much a ritual as any religion. Every year, in late summer, we scour local fields and meadows, flipping the wide yellow-green, leaves of aging milkweed, searching for the bumblebee striped monarch caterpillars hiding beneath. The caterpillars are lovingly carried home in shoeboxes and lunch bags on milkweed leaves dripping creamy sap from their broken stems. Once collected, they are laid inside the butterfly house, a sliver of wildness to ruffle our predictable suburban existence. The children feed them daily, fresh milkweed sprinkled with water, for the waning weeks of summer. In recent years their discoveries have been unnervingly sparse, but this year, caterpillars were abundant and a row of chrysalises hangs from the roof of the venerable butterfly house.

This morning, all morning, my four-year-old, the youngest in the family, kneeled on a chair, rested his elbows on the table and watched the nascent butterfly, its diaphanous legs grasping the remains of its papery womb, its wings drying in the warm September air. He had lived through butterfly hatchings in previous years, but this was the first year he was interested, captivated, putting aside his toys and sticks and rooting himself in front of the house. As luck would have it, he awoke just in time to watch the butterfly emerge, and he was hooked. The wings must dry for hours, and he stayed for hours, occasionally wandering off but always returning. Later, when the sun had warmed the garden and the new creature had begun to wave impatiently, I held the wings and we took it outside. I placed the newborn butterfly onto his outstretched hand and watched his eyes open wide and wider as the monarch flapped and preened on his fingertips. Cautiously, he carried it toward a cluster of red zinnias and golden black-eyed Susans, emitting a small gasp as he watched it rise from his hand, alight on a flower and then ascend into the wild.

Now, I stare at the second dark chrysalis. It was spun before the one we released this morning. It has dwelt in metamorphosis for two full weeks. The morning was magical, but now, in the late afternoon, something is not quite right. I stare at this tiny dark jewel of wildness on my table and wonder about the danger. The wild is breathtaking and beautiful, but it is also messy and unpredictable. It does not conform to human desire. It cares not for our fears. It is indifferent to our dread, to what we despise, what we are tempted to hide, step around and ward off. These things we fear are, along with the moments of inspiration that beckon to us, part of a great wild everything that we only imperfectly understand. I grapple with this relationship. Can I find sacred not just the beauty and the birth, but also those things that frighten and repel me? I love this wild world that is not of my making, that exists outside of my judgments but houses me nonetheless. I am human, yet even the cells in my body are wild.

I want to accept impermanence, yet sometimes still I seek to soften the blow. I am saddened as I tiptoe out of the house one spring morning to collect the stiff body of a mother chipmunk, mindlessly killed by the family cat, knowing that the tiny young chipmunks my children have been observing for days will now starve inside their once cozy burrow. I am dismayed as I search, a few years later, for that very same cat, finding only a few bloody tufts of hair and the footprints of a pair of coyotes who reside in the narrow woodlands and abandoned farm fields of my suburban New England town. I am attentive to the wildness around me, yet still I am startled and shaken when my protected cocoon collides with the immense wild. To this day, I cannot erase from my memory the thudding crunch of a young buck smashing into the grille of my car, its impossible leap across a dark road aborted by two tons of metal. And, I am humbled when reason fails and explanation eludes as something in this wild world goes inexplicably, grievously wrong. So humbled, I stand and stare, in the darkest part of one summer night, unable to avert my eyes from the globs of bloody tissue, matter that once promised to be a babe, swirling around my toilet bowl. It is all wild.

I sit back. The chrysalis is moving, the butterfly emerging. I hesitate, then call the children. This is the only god I know, this wild god of life and death, beauty and dread, inspiration and pain, all mixed up so that we cannot discern one from the other, and I want them to know it too. They all watch. The butterfly struggles out, slowly, weakly. They can see that the wings are deformed, twisted. It is alive, but it will not fly.

I wonder what happened inside that chrysalis. Why are some creatures able to endure the suffocating cage, to die and emerge, re-born? Why are others marked and scarred, unable to transform, to accept, to survive? It is a mother's question. Why do some children thrive and grow, and others wither and die?

The younger children are quiet. I let them watch, knowing they need no explanation. They are scientists, sages, doyennes, connoisseurs of cruelty. They know death in their own childish way. They are morbidly curious, quiet and respectful but not afraid, not looking away. They scrutinize the unfolding, unflinchingly soaking up its defects and flaws, just as they sat on their haunches not a week earlier, hunched over the brittle, belly-up body of a mole, poking at its tiny fingers and bloated bowels with a stick, before scampering off to skip stones across the pond. They are, blessedly, not yet old enough to wonder at the life of the mole.

I look at my firstborn, now twelve, no longer a child, her own body blossoming, unfolding. I see the hint of a grimace on her face, a first whisper of understanding, of questioning, of wondering why, a first hint of knowing that the flip side of this glorious morning of baptism is the elegiac afternoon. Death is life; life is death.

The younger children take a last long look.

"What will happen to it?" they ask.

I hesitate again, holding onto the silence for a moment. "We will take care of it," I assure them, "and, perhaps tomorrow, others will hatch." They are satisfied and run off to play. I look at my eldest. We carefully open the house and lift out the deformed butterfly. It is weak. We are not wild enough to let it linger in dying. We are human, possessed of human sadness, regret, pity. We choose compassion, place it in a plastic bag and lay it in the freezer.