A car windshield, a pair of butterflies and a billion years: Q.R. Quasar's "Volcano Cemetery" starts with a small roadside accident and ends up somewhere vast. The speaker is driving the TransCanadian in high summer when two mating butterflies hit the glass. "Smash!" is the poem's one violent sound, and it arrives mid-line, like the impact itself. The speaker's response is not a shrug or a sentimental sigh but a correction: "death is not a thing, / can never play." The butterflies seemed to "play with death," but death is not a partner in the game. It is not an object or a character. Only the living can play, and death is simply where their play stops.
That thought opens the poem's larger question: how do the living and the dead relate? The second stanza answers by moving sideways into myth. The butterfly "laughs in Chuang-tzu's dream", an allusion to the old Chinese story of a man who dreams he is a butterfly and wakes unsure which of them he really is. The poem takes the story's blurred boundary between one state and another and applies it to life and death. Then the butterfly becomes "his sister, with white wings," a family tie that makes the insect kin rather than specimen. She flits above "the cold rock of an extinct volcano's / magma core," and the ellipsis that follows lets the thought sink downward, as if into the rock itself.
The central image, a living creature over a dead volcano, rests on contrasts of temperature, colour and speed. White wings meet dark stone, and fluttering meets a hardness that has lasted for ages. Quasar sharpens this at Neys Point, where the speaker watches "the white flutter against the water." The sound of that phrase, with its soft *wh*, *fl* and *w* sounds, is as light as the wings it describes. Against it stands the poem's heaviest line: "my mind pulls a heavy haul of time in tow." Its short, weighty words slow the reading down. The metaphor also fits the setting, since "haul" and "in tow" belong to the language of trucks and highways. The road from the opening has become a way of thinking, with the mind as a rig dragging a billion years behind it.
The poem's key move is the fusing of "this now and that now." The speaker stands "a billion years later than the lava flow," yet the line break after "and know" gives the knowledge a moment of quiet before it lands. The colon in "one billion years of now:" then works like a doorway, opening onto the image of "our time dancing inside / the living and the dead." Dancing brings back the earlier idea of play, but now it has a different shape. Life is no longer something death interrupts. Our time moves within both the living and the dead, and the stone, the water and the butterfly all take part.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular line length. Every line begins in lower case, which gives the voice an unhurried, conversational feel, close to thinking aloud. The irregular lines suit a mind wandering from highway to myth to rock. The ending changes the tone: "I pay my respects to the living and the dead, / my teachers in the volcano cemetery." The phrase "pay my respects" is the language of funerals, and it is the only moment of ceremony in the poem. "Volcano cemetery" is itself a striking oxymoron, since a volcano is a place of fire and creation, and here it has become a grave. Yet the speaker calls its occupants "teachers," so the cemetery is also a school.
What makes the poem significant is how much it holds in so little space. It does not mourn the crushed butterflies or lecture us about geology. It turns a trivial death into a way of feeling deep time, and the lesson it draws is humble. Instead of fearing death or setting it against life, the speaker bows to both and accepts that we are always dancing on very old ground.