Mask: Butterfly

Consider the butterfly
on the eve of its metamorphosis: 
Does it sleep?  Or does it drift
in a strange twilight?  A ruffled

patina smoothed on the rising flood-tide? 
And the others who have chosen “to opt-out” this year -- 
What dreams?  The line drawn silent and fallen away.

Every avoidance pattern, or following
through eddies of recognition
trace the sum of all possible pathways
prescient of some vast machinery.  Soft
and somnolent balloons the gap. 


     After sleep, today’s different.  Nothing to unravel,
tho some apprehension of such.  I don’t know --
root systems and drain-offs beneath the garden, punctuating
all that goes on down there . . .
An aimless to-and-froing in the midst of all that groping
progress
surging forth, seeking
deeper realms.  While up here one can only surmise,
and the butterfly effect playing
about the garden linking breezes to other distant places. 

But what obtrudes next also nourishes
us:  That kazoo hearkens of a breaking
away.  Beautiful, the young girls’ naked feet 
wet and glistening in the rain.  The others at play marching
in hats fashioned
from today’s newspaper.  Giotto’s feet is what came
to mind then.  Draw us in closer.  Onlookers jostling
at the ramp.