Poem Of The Week : On the Subject of Butterflies By Maya C. Popa

On the Subject of Butterflies

Trying to write about them is hopeless,
those machinations colluding with air
Turgenev likened to withered maple.

Sentimental, resigned to knowing better,
And wondering still at the paperwork
of flight, armed with nets to breed

a tortured familiarity. Do they recognise
the desperation of our doing,
believing desire should end in evidence,

or after a life at ease with transformation,
are they sure to be returned
to that first moment when anything

might still become of them
in fate’s commanding and indifferent hand?

American poet Maya C. Popa’s wafer-thin, diaphanous tercets engage with the delicacy of perception. Our relationship with the fragile and elusive butterfly, or rather our inability to fully comprehend the natural insouciance of its flight, is measured, fittingly, in inadequate human terms, by the kind of yardstick that would be anathema to a creature whose ‘machinations’ collude with air, confounding our capacity to measure the immeasurable.

Popa well understands the limitation of the word ‘machination’ to describe the tiny, filigree actuations that deliver the butterfly to the air in marvellous indifference. It is a parody, almost, of our failure to circumscribe the insect in words a lepidopterist would understand, in a vain attempt to grade and catalogue, like so many polychromatic ‘sylphs’ pinioned in glass cases.

Our instinctive association of motivation and ‘desire’, our human impulse to seek ‘evidence’ where the beauty of metamorphosis should be its own reward, is undertaken in the butterfly’s world as seamlessly as to make a mockery of introspection. The investment of meaning in the process is as ‘hopeless’ as Popa’s opening line suggests - the inveigling of an ‘indifferent hand’ as ambiguous as endless speculation.

‘On the Subject of Butterflies’ is taken from Dear Life and is published by smith|doorstop (2022).

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