Your unseeing eyes are as gorgeous and false
as the biggest of lies. Rimmed charcoal black,
as seductive as Cleopatra, they stare back.
You spread your wings flat like an oriental fan
laid aside. You are as quiet as the owl is wise.
You have already lived so many lives,
molted five times, each instar a miracle
of new color, each caterpillar incarnation
of you some hitherto unknown green, spangled
gold or speckled black, a plump crawling
wriggle that reveals nothing of the creature
that is coming. You have slept in your own silk
sheets, spun golden as if for the most beloved
courtesan. You have slept and dreamt
only of flight until you woke reborn with wings.
Like gentle hands, you spread your cinnamon
fan to the sun, your feathered tips ridged violet
and pink like stratified siltstone, a painted desert.
You lift up, testing the air, feeling for the flutter
as if tasting champagne for the first time.
With subtle antennae, you venture into the current
of breeze, trail pheromones like perfume
or an exotic music heard only by your kind.
Outward, into the wide day, you advance.
And like a shy girl, tipsy, emboldened, but
always looking over her shoulder,
you begin to dance across the sky.
I follow you and I follow you—
some part of me longing to drift into the distance—
until I can no longer trace your path,
and am released at last
like a hypnotic from a trance.