Nabokov and Barrie on a Yellow Post-It ©

I found a square of paper, a sticky quadrilateral

a blank parallelogram, the golden-yellow rhombus

the empty plane of a Post-it note waiting to be filled  

I found a square of paper discarded in the trash

its tightly compressed fibers like golden-yellow net

I had a thought that fluttered-by, I captured it in script

trapped between right angels, I inked these letters there

            deep and blue with India ink

 

I thought of Nabokov, a man in love with butterflies

more than he was with the prose and poetry he wrote

he filled volumes marking the subtle variegations

the micro-changes in coloration of a butterfly’s wings

the patterns denoting their migrations, spending

more words on these than he ever did on poetry and fiction

 

as a boy I was told to be careful with butterflies

believing that the barest touch could brush the “magic-dust”

from their wings, leaving them moribund and flightless

 

a butterfly is pixie-like…floating, flying, gravity defying

 

Barrie showed us how with a sprinkle of pixie dust (and a laugh)

the heroine Wendy took flight, and took-up arms against old Hook

a pirate panicked by the tick-tock of a clock, the passing of time

Wendy leapt wingless into the sky on clouds of pixie-dust

Soaring through the ether with a pipe-playing-boy-god

a Titan named Pan

 

all butterflies bear the image of the horned-god…dancing in the wind

goat-footed Pan—god of wild places, timeless mad Pan—god of loneliness

shock and feral desire…traits all boys are taught to temper

lest they become lost in their inner child

untamed and wild

 

Nabokov loved butterflies and the metamorphosis of a worm

to witness beauty emerging from the silky creche of the chrysalis

he loved the tragedian, the anti-hero and the tragedy itself

he wrote of the old, the aging and corrupt, of youth and lament

capturing in his pages, like a poem on a Post-It

the fragile nature of longing, delicate as a butterfly…that once acquired

lives but a few moments before it expires