BLUE MORPHO Morpho Menelaus
I don’t understand how a thing can have no color at all, yet we see color. How it is, instead, prismatic refraction, these wings vivid as jewels, but it’s all an engine designed for artifice. What weird physics made beauty sprout from absence?
Some species, I’m told, can only be identified by a close study of their minute genitalia. It’s no wonder entomologists are such a mess.
Shown a case of butterflies pinned to cotton, lined up and gilded with Latin, I could stare for hours. These delicate flakes of pearlized rainbow swivel toward such captured dazzle. The air is peeled back, the mirror fractured.
OUTER BANKS Pea Island National Wildlife Seashore, North Carolina
Kim Roberts is a 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Arts Club of Washington. She is the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC and editor of two anthologies of DC poets, most recently By Broad Potomac’s Shore, selected by the Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program. Her sixth book of poems, Corona/Crown, a cross-disciplinary collaboration with photographer Robert Revere, will be released in Fall 2023 by WordTech Editions. http://www.kimroberts.org