The way I think of you is the way I think of snow
falling from the distance of a warm day:
insistent as the cat in summertime.
She hated to come in. Let her go, you’d say
opening the door just wide enough for her
to slip back through. All those nights with the moths
and the cedar beetles, they’re ending again.
It’s September and monarchs are flying
up and over this unmade bed back to Mexico
to rest on the long needles of the oyamel.
You never could stand to watch anything shut in
behind closed doors, but inside the tented walls
of what they’ll call a butterfly palace there will be
sugar-water in the feeders and a man displaying chrysalides
at every stage of development. I can’t tell them apart,
but he can. He’ll explain the differences
to every school group that passes through squealing
when a blue morpho lands on a blue-jeaned leg
or when all the swallowtails are drawn to a certain
girl’s yellow hair. They will flutter around her
and alight on her hair, and eventually they will leave,
even if it is only when she leaves their vaulted air,
and she will not know what to feel.