Ten Zillion Ways of Looking at a Butterfly
By John MacEnulty

There was an article in the newspaper
About a group who wants to turn the Jewel House in Forest Park
Into a butterfly house.

It sounds Japanese,
Like a brush drawing or a haiku.
It has a depth and richness of silence.
I can't imagine anything with more quiet delight
Than a flight of butterflies.

I watched only one once
For about twenty minutes.
It was a moment of blessing
For a butterfly to flitter about that long near one person,
Blessing and blessing and blessing
As he flew around the wildflowers and trees
Down by the Old Silvermine Creek.
He came close enough to stun me eight or nine times
With his fluttery, yellow bobbing,
Like he was on a string and gravity would pull him down
And the string would yank him up.
He never touched me
But he paralyzed me with wonder.
I watched him with my heart on pause
While he journeyed pointlessly in figure eights,
Not finding or doing anything,
Not landing, not stopping,
Not thinking.
He was totally without meaning
In a Zen kind of way.
He was in butterfly Tao
And the stream was bickering over the rocks
And the grasshoppers were buzzing and hopping.

Another time, I saw hundreds of monarch butterflies all at once.
This is apparently nothing.
Skies full of them have been reported.

Once I saw tens of thousands of snow geese
At a lake in Iowa
And it was a white and magical moment
As they circled in squadrons, honking, elegantly distant,
And glided into the lake in hundreds of sorties,
Training missions,
Formation practice,
Or just someplace to get out and honk
Where a guy can hear himself honk.
But that's another story and it's not about butterflies
And this poem is, so enough of that.

Seeing those couple of hundred monarch butterflies
Was like finding Easter eggs.
First I saw one, then another, then another.
Once I gift used to finding them they were
Everywhere.
They were on flowers and tree branches
And under leaves and in bushes,
On the ground, way up in the air.
I felt like running after them,
Like my dog at the lake chasing the fat, white ducks,
Or like a three year old going after bubbles in the air.

Going into a butterfly house would be
Like a tropical storm of rainbows,
Like snowflakes that were really dancing,
Like thousands of eyelids kissing your cheeks.
It would be a glittering
And the trees would have butterflies for leaves
And the sky would look like a giant kaleidoscope.

It would be triple Zen, Japanese, Buddha, Buddha, Butterfly
And even the Little Prince could look at just one precious one if he wanted to
He could watch its trembling membranes pulsing
As it lit upon a flower,
Watch its wings throb slowly open and shut.
Open and shut. Open and shut.
And suddenly it would take off into the butterfly sky
And he wouldn't even cry.
But he might blink a few times.

There is a butterfly house movement.
The article in the Post Dispatch
Is part of a big, slow hand moving in the world,
Moving slowly enough so that a butterfly might land on it,
Cradle itself in the gentle palm.
It is part of a butterfly collective awareness
That manifests in newsprint
And is dictating this poem to my melded mind.

It's, like, a big Walt Disney special,
"The Wonderful World of Butterflyland!"
And Walt Disney, holographically projected
Will stand like a vapor in the midst of a cloud of butterflies
Pronouncing his words carefully with a soft, explanatory smile.

The butterfly effect will reach critical mass
And we will pass into
Butterfly consciousness
In which all time is condensed down into this now
And we are but a timeless blink
Of the eternal eye
Which says why
Not be a butterfly?

    By John MacEnulty, Eman8tions@aol.com Date: 11/1/98

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