THE DAWN APPEARS WITH BUTTERFLIES

You leave before daybreak to prepare your husband’s body for burial at dawn. It is one of countless dawns since the first crack of consciousness, each buried in molecular memory, each as distinct as your face in the stew of human faces, your eyes blinking back force in the vortex of loss and heartbreak.

I put on another pot of coffee, watch out the kitchen window at the beginning of the world, follow your difficult journey to Flagstaff, through rocks that recall the scarlet promises of gods, their interminable journeys, and pine. Until I can no longer see, but continue to believe in the sun’s promise to return:

And it will this morning. And tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow, building the spiral called eternity out of each sun, the dance of butterflies evoking the emerging.

Two nights ago you drove north from the hospital at Flagstaff, after his abandonment to the grace we pursue as wild horses the wind. Your grief was the dark outlining the stars. One star in particular waved to you as you maneuvered in the nightmare of the myth of death. It broke loose, stammered, then flew marking the place between the star house of the gods and Third Mesa.

You laughed with the spirit of your husband who would toss stars! And your tears made a pale butterfly, the color of dawn, which is the color of the sky of the next world, which isn’t that far away.

There is no tear in the pattern. It is perfect, as our gradual return to the maker of butterflies, or our laughter as we considered the joke of burying him in the shirt you always wanted him to wear, a shirt he hated.

Someone is singing in the village. And the sacredness of all previous dawns resonates. That is the power of the singer who respects the power of the place without words, which is as butterflies, returning to the sun, our star in the scheme of stars, of revolving worlds.

And within that the power of the dying is to know when to make that perfect leap into everything. We are all dying together, though there is nothing like the loneliness of being the first or the last, and we all take that place with each other.

In the west at every twilight since the beginning, the oldest spirits camp out with their dogs. It is always in the season just before winter. It is always shooting star weather and they wash dishes by dipping them in river water warmed in a bucket.

Coffee heats over the fire. Crows take their sacred place. The sun always returns and butterflies are a memory of one loved like no other. All events in the universe are ordinary. Even miracles occur ordinarily as spirits travel to the moon, visit distant relatives, as always.

Then at dusk they share the fire that warms the world, and sit together remembering everything, recounting the matrix of allies and enemies, of sons and daughters, of lovers and lovers, each molecule of the sky and earth an explosion of memory within us.

In this fierce drama of everything we are at this juncture of our linked journey to the Milky Way—as your babies stir in bittersweet dreams while you travel to your most difficult good-bye—as Grandma lies down with them to comfort them—as your father’s truck starts down the road in the village as a dog barks

everything is a prayer for this journey.

As you shut the door behind you in the dark:

Wings of dusk

Wings of night sky

Wings of dawn

Wings of morning light

It is sunrise now.