A New Poem At Last

Papillons en liberté

         –Montreal Botanical Gardens, May 2014

My wife of these thirty-odd short years

(why can’t there be thirty more?) and I

look down on a riffled pool

that forms from a man-made flume and shines

under man-made greenhouse light.  These butterflies

have hatched in all their many scores.

We watch them dip and rise among

bright, quick-bursting bubbles. 

Spring blooms surround us in pent profusion.

We smile to recall the words of her sister’s son,

now far from the small blond child who spoke them:

Do butterfries fry good? he asked me.

We repeat the cute question as one.

In the wild some of them “fry” 3000 miles.

I know that’s true, but almost think it can’t be:

They’re swept off-course by the paltry air

stirred by their visitors’ ahs and oohs.

Still I know it won’t do, the trite equation

of frail and lovely. They’re tough. It must

be fleetingness that floors me. That’s what shows.

I’ve learned some names today: blue morpho,

and you, rice paper, all but translucent,

and postman, you, whose very name

now sounds so quaint, so obsolescent.

Hello-goodbye. Nice to have met you.