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.