Martin Willitts Jr

The Other Side of Language

The other side of language begins with a girl
chasing swallowtails, her feet covered with dust
of soft music, as she finds the butterfly within her grasp.
She reaches for an elusive world, one with yearning
beyond her touch. Her hands want to fetch
those darting colors of numerous swallowtails.
She ignores the unspoken truth she desires
what she cannot have. Life can’t be contained.
This is the delicate world she enters but
she’s enchanted. She doesn’t know what she’d do
if she caught a butterfly. She’d probably release it.
Who would want to harm such a harless creature?
Even Butterflies have a home. Her hands move
like haiku: quick, short, suggesting a season
with a hawk circling over a target too small to see.
She skip-leaps after a swallowtail, one of many
unobtainable goals she’ll chase someday.
All life contains immediacy, evidence of chances,
as she wanders into the heart of it all, finds buoyancy
on the other side of language, tender moments
never knowing what to say, what’s viable,
what’s not, what jerks suddely in front of her.
She realizes she doesn’t need to say a word;
just experience. Chasing becomes everything.

Martin Willitts Jr edits the Comstock Review. Winner of the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, 2020. His 25 chapbooks include the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Flowstone Press, 2017), 24 full-length collections including Blue Light Award “The Temporary World.” His forthcoming is “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” will include all 36 color pictures. Five of the poems appeared in Willawaw Journal.