New Hampshire Dreaming (prose poem)

New Hampshire Dreaming, 3 AM

I was walking with a friend at night in high coniferous
woods. We looked up in very little light to see occasional
large butterflies whose colors revealed themselves only
at a particular angle and only when they rested briefly,
perhaps twenty feet up, on the trunks of very tall but
slender pines. One in silhouette seemed somehow
shaped like a broad corkscrew; then, as my own position
shifted, it glowed a deep gold like a monarch in sunlight,
just for a second before it flew off. Another was a deep
blue, almost cobalt, its rich color improbably distinct
in the semi-darkness.
As we walked further, calling each other's attention
to unusual plants or to mysterious glimmering on
the trees' bark, two jets, fighters, flew over at a couple of
hundred feet, slow as canoes resting in a moderate current.
We wondered whether they were looking for us, but after
a few moments they accelerated to a boomless supersonic
speed and raced almost vertically into the sky.
Somewhere in this dream was a thought of my
strict grandmother, now dead for more than forty years, the
grandmother who called me out in childhood for general
laziness one hot morning when I malingered in the upstairs
bathroom to avoid my assigned weeding in her garden. In
the dream her death felt recent, and we wondered who would
live in her room at the farm now that she was gone.
The woods we walked in were a mere strip, a hundred feet
wide, flanked by indistinct open land that might have been
clearcut; and then there were the planes, and our having
reached this path not on a long hike but in a Volvo station
wagon, parked nearby, its power and comfort a badge
of our complicity.