Poetry – Issue 6 | August 2009
Two poems by Ingrid Steblea
After Pleasure Island
In Singapore he rides the cable car to Sentosa,
the Island of Tranquility, the pleasure island.
He tours Butterfly Park, marveling at the painted wings
of Lepidoptera. On the wings of a hawk moth from Madagascar
there is a pattern that looks like a grasshopper’s head.
Primary-colored butterflies cling upside down to leaves,
vibrant, dangling like a woman’s earrings.
In one corner a chrysalis depends from a plant stem.
He gazes at it, wondering at a creature that could wrap itself in silk
and emerge transformed. It is something like a mummy
in an old horror movie stepping out of a creaking sarcophagus,
or else Christ pushing the stones from his tomb on the third day.
Or else Osiris, or Lazarus arising at the foot of the Mount of Olives.
The Native American ghost dances, the phoenix, and Persephone’s
half-death each year. He scratches his chin and stares at his reflection
staring back at him from the butterflies’ glass terrarium.
He studies the tourists with their cameras. He looks down
at his hands, his tanned arms with their fine blond hair.
That night at the youth hostel, he takes the white sheets from the bed
and wraps himself in them. He lies with his eyes closed, imagining a Y-shaped
incision across his chest, its edges the luminescent outline of a pair of wings.
About the author
Long before Ingrid Steblea settled in the beautiful Happy Valley area of western Massachusetts, she and her husband and son traveled across the continental US by car. Ingrid’s poetry has appeared in Poem, Rattle, The Seattle Review, The Southern Anthology, and other journals, and she was the featured poet in the December 2008 edition of ouroboros review. She leads an online writers group and is currently working on a novel.
