Butterflies: a Meditation

1
The poem's creation:
a flight-path seemingly
without pattern,
bewildering to the naked eye;
at moments,
an incomprehensible lightness.
2
The poem itself
is a wing:
a taut membrane
that radiates colours
beyond human sight.
Over its calm surface
a rhythm of curves plays;
it makes a pointedly
rounded statement about
the nature of form.
3
At a distance, ethereal.
Nearer, it's all texture,
invites a close reading:
of scent scales, hairs,
some laminated to create
iridescence—a shimmer
the eye cannot photograph.
Poetry again …
4
The legendary Blue Xerces is gone—
grasped at by many hands.
Clear-wings know the ways of light
too well to be possessed.
Between these opposites
all butterflies hover:
poems pinned between pages;
dream-bearers sent by gods.
5
Air, elder-flower, prunus leaf:
beauty exists always in relation;
mates with its mirror-image,
stores reflections of itself
in glass palaces;
stays in plain view while
skirting the edge of vision—
a blur of coral, lobelia blue,
scarlet, salt-white, ebony.
6
What will these leonine wings
connect with, where alight?
Metaphor is such a dance of
possibility, a weightless touching:
gold leaves flutter, take pause,
among yellow buddleia in late sun.
7
The butterfly as psyche
that lives in the body, the poem,
inhabits the flesh of words,
feeds us images
of ourselves,
plants us deeper inside
now, this.
8
But the body, after all,
is pivot of flight,
storer of fuel,
centre;
the journey
a line of energy
unravelled from it.
So poetry moves in
arcs, at tangents,
an instinctive
map
round ordered
garden, wilderness,
ocean, the great globe.
9
Poems with poison in them
flaunt themselves—why not?—
pose as invincible.
More vulnerable others
blend carefully with backgrounds,
stay intransigently what they are.
10
The poet as lepidopterist:
not the laying on of hands
but the laying out of wings.
11
Butterflies sup on
nectar, honeydew and sap;
carrion and excrement.
Poetry, too, sustains
itself on sweetness
and on what is most
rejected—therefore
most to be contemplated …
A city of petals
flutters above dung.
12
Always this doubleness:
a void that breaks down structure,
draws in despair;
a fallowness by which things
grow into themselves,
patience the alchemy—
spirit-bodies, weavers of light,
shaped in a darkness
sealed by transparency.