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.