He lit beside me like a butterfly—

with silver lips and glass albino eyes. All

through the night, his specter spoke to me

because I could not bear to be alone

and missed him so that somehow,

through a lurid, emerald light, he flew

to me with love.

“Some lovers lie,” he said,

“together, yet apart— the separation wider

than a world. But look at us, my friend,

apart and yet together at your call,

embraced through space and time.”

“I didn’t have much time to be

with you,” I said. “I’m glad I’m with you this way now

at least —or should I say, at most—

in your ideals. For love to us

was so ill-timed, ill-starred. I wasted moments now

we only dream. I hate love every morning when I wake.”

The great, pellucid butterfly tipped his wings.

Their bleached, acidic lusters evanesced

into a dark dimension, not this world. Unfolded

into sight again, he said, “There comes a time

when all of us must leave. The day must break,

and none can catch the dream that keeps me here

with you.”

Suspended there, he shed two pearls

for tears, his fingernails a polished ivory,

his hair a blond no fairer than his skin.

He left a spectral frost on my lips with his ethereal kiss

and then took flight in one clear vanishing,

my white phantasm in the black of night.

Ken Anderson’s (he/him) Someone Bought the House on the Island was a finalist in the Independent Publisher Book Awards. A stage adaptation won the Saints and Sinners Playwriting Contest and premiered May 2, 2008, at the Marigny Theater in New Orleans. An operatic version premiered June 16, 2009, at the First Existentialist Congregation in Atlanta. His novel Sea Change: An Example of the Pleasure Principle was a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award.