A Collector of Blues

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer – and I want no other fame.
Vladimir Nabokov "On Discovering a Butterfly"

He wandered the Hamburg Trail through switchbacks,
along high ridge lines bridging islands of sky.
He crossed over the wind-swept San Pedro Basin
below the Huachucas rising high on the horizon.
He descended onto the moist and cool canyon floor,
along a stream beneath sycamore, maple, and columbine.

Later, perched up on a stool in an adobe tavern
he leaned against the bar and spread before him
the small translucent envelopes, each containing
a different species of butterfly, each a different color,
a different size and dimension. Others were tucked
into a metal Band-Aid box meticulously recorded.

He has chased his little butterflies since a young boy,
first the great white-banded black cheriomukha
in the marshlands beyond the River Oredezh,
hoping one day to capture an unknown Eupithécia,
that delicate creature blending into its environs,
the swamps deep in thick pine groves and scrub alder.
His researches took him to the Grunewald near Berlin,
to Stromovka Park in Prague, to the Bois de Boulogne,
to Le Boulou and the Ariège-Saurat in the south of France.
There he found a new species of lycaenids above Moulinet,
where the cold winds blow at the foot of the Pyrenees.
He explored the English moor country and the Finger Lakes,
and later the high Churicahua Desert above Portal.

One morning armed with a tarlatan bag he netted
a brown and gray-stippled wood-satyr as it skittered
over the banks of a spring-fed stream running
through Ramsey Canyon’s hushed solitude. Quickly
stepping over a succulent carpet of yucca and agave,
with a deft twist of the wrist and the wide sweep
of a gauzy muslin netbag he captured his enigmatic prey.
A brief agonizing moment and the cyllópsis pyracmon
was dispatched with an expert pinch of its humming thorax.
Now it rests in its glazed casing among the many scattered
on a stained wooden bar table. Some of them were similar
to satyrids found farther north, in the Wasatch canyons,
but this one was new; he had never seen one of these before.
Later that evening, in a quiet cottage beyond the canyon;
each relaxed specimen was removed from its small envelope,
each mounted on the setting board in a supine attitude
to display its delicate undersides for careful inspection, .
only its sculptured sex revealing its genus and species.

These discoveries would speak loudly to him in later life,
while climbing among the old vineyards above Montreux.
As in childhood during expeditions beyond Vyra, the Oredezh,
his remaining years were spent in search of soft-winged blues,
before his own life was extinguished by unforgiving fingers
and he joined his little butterflies pinned in sleep under glass.

Pumpkin Tattoo

Here is my most recent poem, written in the waning days of our summer sojourn in Maine.
_________________________

PUMPKIN TATTOO

In the portraits of that house, the windows
are eyes or pieces of the soul almost.
Andrew Wyeth

I am feeling autumnal.

Traveling those Pennsylvania back roads
a dozen times or more I wandered over
the Brandywine’s tranquil oxbows,
looking high and low for the Hill Girt Farm,
thinking that October’s flaming cedars
would lead me to that elusive pumpkin patch.
You told me where to go, when to turn
and where. But where was it? I was lost.

It was far easier to find this old house
among Cushing’s saltwater farms,
here on the foggy margin on Hathorn Point.
We stare deep into the St. George River,
studying the subtleties of the blue distant sea,
the smoky approaches of a sou’wester.
It helps having you here this time around, you
who know all the stories of his time here.
You called him Old Bones, he wanted you to,
and you recall him in his younger days when
he would wander these dry, dusty upstairs rooms.
We look through twelve-paned window at the field
where he watched Christina slowly crab-walk
from the small graveyard down on the point, here
to this weather-worn house encased in clapboard,
grown winter gray-scarred and summer burnished.
There, on the point, her bones now find final rest
in hard-scrabble soil through the seasons of forty years.
The day before they buried her he returned here
in January darkness, wandering these empty rooms,
trying hard to ignore the clatter of the jackhammer
opening her frozen grave, perhaps pondering that day
when frost would heave his own bones next to hers.

And now I watch you wandering through the old
and desiccated house, past the long cold Glenwood
stove, beyond the blue door scratched and rub by age,
I see the pumpkin tattoo etched above your tail bone,
the one you wanted since you were a young girl
wandering those Pennsylvania byways in autumn,
reminding me of my own search for Hill Girt Farm,
that pumpkin patch with the haunting faces carved
in stacked jack-o-lanterns, their bright orange slitted
eyes and tilted smiles glowing as if beacons from
beyond that grave down on the point, the old man’s
bones home to rest though his soul still wanders here.
In these darkening upstairs rooms we sit quietly,
together we watch the gentle sea breeze trifle
with the same moldering muslin through which he watched
her drag herself through the summer timothy, with each
hint of wind the dust of eternity settling over us.