damp throats of flowers

Last week a looping, loping butterfly found its way into the kindergarten building at the school. Of course once inside, all she wanted was her freedom. Soon she found her way to the huge picture window. (Which I might add, is directly adjacent to the wide open front doors of the building.) The small, student-tended garden just beyond the window beckoned to the butterfly. And so again and again she banged her fragile wings up against the glass, in a futile attempt to break free of those four walls.

With a gaggle of 4 to 6 year old campers looking on, I climbed atop the nature table, carefully cupped the resistant butterfly in my hands, and then released her back to nature. When I photographed this butterfly the next day, I liked to imagine that it was my same little friend from the kindergarten building, and that the images I captured before she took flight were her gift back to me...

One or Two Things

Don’t bother me.

I’ve just

been born.

The butterfly’s loping flight

carries it through the country of the leaves

delicately, and well enough to get it

where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping

here and there to fuzzle the damp throats

of flowers and the black mud; up

and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly

lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk

of some ordinary flower.

The god of dirt

came up to me many times and said

so many wise and delectable things, I lay

on the grass listening

to his dog voice,

crow voice,

frog voice; now,

he said, and now,

and never once mentioned forever,

which has nevertheless always been,

like a sharp iron hoof,

at the center of my mind.

One or two things are all you need

to travel over the blue pond, over the deep

roughage of the trees and through the stiff

flowers of lightning — some deep

memory of pleasure, some cutting

knowledge of pain.

But to lift the hoof!

For that you need

an idea.

For years and years I struggled

just to love my life. And then

the butterfly

rose, weightless, in the wind.

“Don’t love your life

too much,” it said,

and vanished

into the world.

-Mary Oliver