Butterfly Effect

Man, when I
see a butterfly, it’s like
I get lost in its world, its
butterfly’s-eyes view as it flutters, lands
on a drawn blade of autumn grass, wings
pulled up in rest position, and

you can finally see its pattern

a mosaic of microscopically iridescent scales,
standing aglow in light as if light
were the air that uplifts it
When the butterfly lands

I am back in my body, just agawk.
When the butterfly takes off, my feet
leave the ground or
the Earth drops away and I
am back out of my body, aflutter. Can I just stop

a sec and inject an aside? My kidnapped
-and-raised-by-butterflies awe
of these fellows is a joke.

It’s a fucking bug.
But if it’s a joke to others, I have
no doubt it should be, but I am completely full
of and fooled by it. No deliberate fool,
but a willing one.

So this one time,
one landed on me.

I can’t even describe
how motionless I was in that moment,
or how long it held me. In memory

I am sure I did not even breathe.

The air began just circulating
by cool breeze in and through my lungs,
and out by warm, wet zephyr, like a draft
through a house, except
keeping me alive.

That butterfly landing saved my life.

I didn’t freeze when it landed - on my hand!!
- which was held out in front of me lazily,
for no reason, like some super-aloof falconer
- I wasn’t frozen, wasn’t paralyzed, just

motionless.

Like a stone in the sun,
and perfectly unconsciously
comfortable as that stone,
as the moment drew on
unnoticed.

The passing of time,
I mean, was unnoticed.
The moment simply held,

as if all the world
were sufficient within it. Why
are you here, dude? Thanks for landing.

I welcome you. I would not slide a pin
through you for anything.

And I must have begun zoning out, because
I noticed it had lifted off, it was already
about a handsbreadth from my hand and then gone
- off through the air. Making a curly-swirly
dotted line behind it in my mind. But I didn’t

actually see it lift off,
to cover that first bit of distance. It must’ve

been a persistence-of-vision trick, how you
stare for so long at one spot
that your eyes begin to absorb
and balance out all the surrounding
world into background pattern, and any
little shift your gaze makes
sends shivers and flashes through the whole thing.
It corrects
quickly once you follow
a moving object on. Its wings

while it lit

were a sort of straw-spun gold, mottled
with dull gold splotches. Its body
was perfectly assured, perched for a rest
on this odd, safe place of mine - which

I normally use for purposes
that would confuse our insect friend.

It flew off. Back on its course
towards and past and crossing behind
a tree my mind tells me was hickory now,
mid-sized, nothing ostentatious. Its leaves yellow,
green, or yellow-green

so it must’ve been winter. California.
I didn’t follow. I never do.
But that one event’s impact and
consequences rippled and permeated
all through the next days, and as they reached
to weeks and further, recurring regularly
in decreasingly returning waves
with increasingly-wider troughs. Even

now, there’s an unbroken motionless moment
within me, every time it comes back. The same
unbroken motionless moment. I guess

it’s going in the background without me, when
I’m not in it! Don’t underestimate

the butterfly effect.

The movie version is
a confusing and unbelievable misrepresentation. A

mess. The real thing
is much more nuanced
and sublime, and I can’t
even conceive its pleasures
piling up or branching out

to catastrophe.