I found a square of paper, a
sticky quadrilateral
A blank parallelogram, a
golden-yellow rhombus
I found a square of paper,
discarded in the trash
The empty plane of a Post-it note, waiting to be filled
I found its tightly woven mesh, like
a golden-yellow net
And then, a thought that fluttered
by—
These inky-blue
letters, inspired by 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 recording
The subtle variegations of a
butterfly’s wings
Micro-changes in coloration denoting
their migrations
Than he did composing his tomes of
poetry and fiction
When I was 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 of how with a
sprinkle of dust (and a laugh)
The heroine Wendy took flight, waging
war against a pirate
Whose only fear was time, the only
thing old Hook was panicked by
The tick-tock revolution of the
hands of a clock, Wendy flew
And she fought, for the
pipe-playing-boy-god (she loved)
She laughed and flew—soaring with a
Titan named Pan
Floating wingless into the heavens,
gravity defying
All butterflies bear the image of
Pan, the face of the horned God
As they dance in the wind, goat-footed
Pan the God of wild places
Timeless Pan, God of loneliness
and madness, God of shock and,
Feral desire, traits all boys are cautioned
to temper, lest they become
Lost in the haunts of their inner
child, goatish—untamed and wild
Nabokov loved butterflies, the chrysalis,
he loved beauty
And to witness it emerging, even in
the metamorphosis of a worm
He loved the tragedian, the
anti-hero, and the tragedy itself he longed for
The destruction of tyrants…of self,
basking in the subversion of the aged
In the morass of a wild youth,
lamenting its corruption, celebrating rebirth
He caught in his pages, like a
poem on a Post-It the fragile nature
of longing
As delicate as the netted butterfly,
which once acquired—
Lives but a few moments before it expires
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