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You’ll be landed on, the attendant warns. The sign
Outside the conservatory says: this display is temporary.
Ten thousand butterflies drinking at the museum from orange
Dish scrubbies placed in clay saucers with sweet plastic
Broth, the business on stainless steel stems. The butterflies crowd
The fake flowers, cheap happy hour.
Babies pinch and mouth the forsaken orchid blossoms, more
Children here than butterflies and two critical girls, “That’s
Not clearwing.” “They only live for two weeks.” “Who cares” hover
Over a butterfly pincushion, oblivious to the old attendant
Who picks up the dead, slips them into her apron like coins.
And they’re falling through the warm air
Like doll plates, like tiny mail, my worst small ideas.
Like the poems I wrote when I lived with my father. I knew my
Words were false; I could never resist paper at night or flight.
Now I am ducking, pressurized, humidified, forced to move so slowly
Through the crowded garden under glass with my heavy-footed tribe.
I am worried to death I’ll accidentally kill the one who lands on me.
Don’t land on me. My shoulders up around my ears, I’m stuck
Behind the two girls, wondering what if I was their mother and I didn’t
Like them at all, not even their smooth perfect bone backs?
My daughters, insomniac orchid ignorers, complaining
About the perfect humidity? Butterflies don’t sleep either. They drink,
Drink, drink drink. Born in the Butterfly Bungalow where on dowels
Chrysalises hang like earrings in a hippie store:
Pairs and pairs of molten silver on leaf, emerald green drops,
Flanged, speckled, dangling glass. The butterflies come
Out of the jewels broken, bent, casualties, seeming dead
As one always seems, coming out of beauty. That’s a moth,
Girl says, aghast at vast stupidity. I have said only on word: beautiful.
So this is how I leave with my life, flickering far below my heart,
Unnameable, without wings. I am not landed on. I’m at the exit,
Breathing, where a white baby sits in alone on the path in a mist
Under a frond, a giant owl butterfly (moth!) mid-tiptoe on his bald
Head, both of them absolutely still, the way a moment can say: there is time.
I can’t bend to brush the wings away, they seem inserted, glued.
The attendant says, “His mother was lost. For a minute. But
You go out here,” and as I do, my dress is pulled back,
In his baby fist, my flowered hem, fluttering, tethered, temporary.
Return to Boys I Borrow
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