Sometimes, sometimes my fears are tempered by hope.
But then there's always these specters.
Right?
That I just can't seem to shake.
I can share them.
I can't shake them.
"The Blue."
"One will live to see the caterpillar rot
everything they walk on.
Seacliff, buckwheat cleared, relentless ice plant
to replace it.
The wild fields bisected by scenic highway,
canyons covered with cul de sacs, gas
stations, comfortable homes.
The whole habitat along this coastal stretch endangered.
Everything, everyone, everywhere in it in danger as well.
But now, they're logging the one stilling hawk Smith sights.
The conspiring grasses.
Shh, shh, shh.
The coreopsis Mattoni's boot barely spares.
And netted, a solitary blue butterfly.
Smith, ahead of him, chasing the stream,
Mattoni wonders if he plans to swim again.
Just like that, the spell breaks.
It's years later.
Mattoni lecturing on his struggling butterfly.
How fragile.
If his daughter spooled out the fabric
she's chosen for her wedding gown,
raw taffeta burled a bright hued tan,
perhaps Mattoni would remember how those dunes looked
from a distance.
The fabric balanced between her arms,
making valleys in the valley.
The fan above her, mimicking the breeze.
He and his friend loved everything,
softly undulating under the coyest wind,
and the rough truth as they walked through the land,
scratch and scrabble.
And no one was there then, besides Mattoni and his friend,
walking along Dolan's Creek in that part of California
they hated to share.
The ocean, a mile or so off.
Anything but passive, so that even there in the canyon
they sometimes heard it smack and pull well-braced rocks.
The breeze basic, salty, bitter, sour, sweet.
Smith trying to identify the scent,
tearing leaves of manzanita yelling, 'This is it.
Here, this is it.'
His hand to his nose, his eyes having finally
seen the source of his pleasure alive.
In the lab after the accident, he
remembered it, the butterfly.
How good a swimmer Smith had been.
How rough the currents there at Half Moon Bay.
His friend alone with reel and rod,
Mattoni back at school early that year.
His summer finished too soon.
Then all of them together in the sneaker wave,
and before that the ridge.
Congregations of pinking blossoms and one of them
bowing, scaring up the living, the frail and flighty beast too
beautiful to never be pinned.
Those nights Mattoni worked without his friend,
he remembered too.
He called the butterfly Smith's Blue."