25
If I look up from my page
the butterfl y is often
the one moving thing in sight.
I watch him rise at the end
of a glide with a broken,
tottering movement, working
his way up to a high bough
then not alighting, but merely
poising in the air above it
and veering briskly off . Well,
he's not after anything.
A kind of extract of this
place, having worked free, he stays;
his apparently hesitant
turning this way and that is
just delighted watchfulness.
Afternoons he spends mainly
resting. And nights
on a weed stem, I suppose,
stiff ening with the chill,
the stem knobbly with dew when
the morning sun fi rst strikes it.