Nabokov on a Yellow Post-It ©

I found a square of paper, a sticky quadrilateral, I found it

A blank parallelogram, a golden-yellow rhombus, I found

The empty plane of a Post-it note, waiting to be filled  

I found a square of paper, discarded in the trash, I saw

Its tightly woven mesh, a golden-yellow net, and then

I found a thought, it fluttered by, these inky-blue letters

The inspiration of a butterfly, trapped between right angels

I thought of Nobokov, a man in love with butterflies

More so than he was with prose, he spilled more ink to record

The subtle variegations, the micro-changes in coloration

Of a butterfly’s wings, denoting their migrations

Than he ever did composing his tomes of poetry and fictions

I remember as a boy, I was told to be careful with butterflies

I was instructed that the barest touch, would brush the “magic”

Dust from their wings, without which they could not fly

A butterfly is pixie-like; floating, flying, gravity defying

Barrie wrote, that with a sprinkle of pixie dust (and a laugh)

The heroine Wendy took flight, she went to war with a pirate

Whose only fear was time, the thing old Hook panicked by

The tick-tock turn of the hands of a clock, Wendy flew

She fought, for the pipe-playing-boy-god (who she loved)

She laughed and went soaring with a Titan named Pan

Carried wingless into the heavens on clouds of pixie-dust

All butterflies bear his image, the face of the horned God

Dancing in the wind, goat-footed Pan the God of wild places

Timeless Pan, God of loneliness and madness, the God of shock

Of feral desire, traits all boys are taught to temper, or become    

Lost in the haunts of the inner child, untamed and wild

Nabokov loved butterflies, the chrysalis, he loved beauty

To witness it emerging in the metamorphosis of a worm

He loved the tragedian, the anti-hero, and the tragedy itself

The destruction of tyrants…of self, he basked in the subversion

Of old age and corruption, in the morass of a wild youth

And its lament, he caught in his pages, like a poem on a Post-It

The fragile nature of longing, as delicate as the netted butterfly

That once acquired, lives but a few moments until it expires