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A butterfly batted its flame-and-leopard wings
against the salt breeze, flickered
through the sea-grass maze like a dyed paper
likeness of itself and witnessed this:
a dolphin at the end of her day languished ashore;
her flipper spaded the beach; her tail begged the foam;
mourned by starfish, who envied their namesakes
buttoned in the warm spread of sky—
(we all want the property of light)—she nuzzled
the sand while her child bleated from the shallows;
the elegy wind sang down her back and bowed
her dorsal fin like a viola; a halo of gulls wheeled
overhead; she drank in their bony cackles
as she surrendered to a part of the earth
she was never meant to know;
night keeps its promise; it comes to each of us;
somewhere in the ocean's twilight shushing
was the memory, now as lost as a drowned ship,
of joyful pirouettes against a gracious moon;
the butterfly alighted on the pedastal of her snout,
its stuttering wings rousing her grateful anticipation
that the blue sweep above was another sea;
close your eyes, the butterfly said, it's
good to close them.
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