Butterflies

Some days her main job seems to be to welcome back the Red Admiral as it lights on a leaf of the yellow forsythia. It is her duty to stop & lean over to take in how it folds & opens its wings. Then, too, there is the common Tiger Swallowtail, which seems to her entirely uncommon in how it moves about the boundaries of this clearing we made so many years ago. If she leaves the compost bucket unwashed to rescue a single tattered wing from under the winter jasmine or the blue flowers of the periwinkle & then spends a whole afternoon at our round oak table surrounded by field guides & tea until she is sure—yes—that it belongs to a Lorquin's Admiral, or that singular mark is one of the great cat's eyes of a Milbert's Tortoiseshell, then she is simply practicing her true vocation learning the story behind the blue beads of the Mourning Cloak, the silver commas of the Satyr Anglewing, the complex shades of the Spring Azure, moving through this life letting her sweet, light attention land on one luminous thing after another.