For use: Saturday, September 9, 2000 and thereafter

 

mfinley.com: "Monarchs & Viceroys"

by Michael Finley

A friend called to me at our dog walk, near the airport. "I was thinking of you the other day," he said, "what with you being a poet and all. I was here in this stand of trees, and I noticed the branches were loaded with butterflies. I figured you’d appreciate something like that."

I wanted to tell him he'd done the right thing -- delegated high feeling and lofty expression to a trained professional. What kind of world would this be if people thought their own thoughts?

And I wondered what he thought I could do about the butterflies that he couldn’t -- write an Ode on a Butterfly? ("Oh, ye flapping-hinged harbingers of autumn...")

"Oh," I said instead, "I know just what you mean. I was here a week ago, walking under these aspens, unaware they were there. Suddenly they all jumped out of the branches and were fluttering around me, above my head, everywhere.

"Your eye couldn’t follow all of them at once, so you looked in a general way, at the shape of the swarm, until you got dizzy."

See, how poetic was that?

Truth is, poems are a lousy way to learn out about nature. The elevation of tone tends to kill the actualness, and the factualness, of what you are seeing. I have read dozens of poems about whippoorwills and nightingales, for instance. But I never "got" from the poems that a whippoorwill is this humble creature that plops itself on open ground to nest. Or that the nightingale swoops down at night with a piercing cry that is really kind of scary.

To learn these things, you need nature books, or someone who can show you firsthand. Or you need to pay attention.

I learned on the WWW just now that monarchs occupy most of the northern U.S. and Canada. But when September comes along, they nearly all fly south to Mount Angangueo in the Mexican state of Michoacan, where they reproduce, and die, but their offspring fly back north in the spring.

Along they way they feed on swamp milkweed, which is poisonous to just about every species but them. Thus the word gets out not to eat a monarch.

And another species entirely, the viceroy butterfly, only a centimeter smaller than the monarch (viceroy means "under-monarch") but otherwise identical, benefits from this intimation of toxicity. Birds don’t eat viceroys for fear they might be monarchs.

Digressing further, I always supposed the woolly bear caterpillar, being black and brown, was the larva for the monarch or viceroy. It is the only caterpillar I have ever wanted to rub noses with, inching funnily along my finger. But it isn’t. It's its own bug, turning into the smaller tiger moth when it’s finished caterpilling. The fur is what makes them so anthropomorphically sweet -- halve its bristles and the creature loses its mammalian aura and becomes just another writhing toothbrush head.

In the 70s, my brother Brian and I used to dream up bumper sticker ideas, thinking money could be made that way. Our ideas were inevitably flawed. My best idea was HONK IF YOU'RE WHITE, the flaw of which was that it struck unironic people as racist. His best was I BRAKE FOR WOOLY BEARS, the flaw of which no one in the big city, where people buy these things, knew what a woolly bear was.

And so the mind goes, idly flapping from idea to idea. I relate tremendously to the charming, demented migration of these pretty creatures from Minnesota to Michoacan every September. Unlike us, they seem to belong in the shimmering aspen boughs, they are born to it, as befits their name.

And I think that if I put out my hand and one of these beautiful fellows were to light on my finger, and pose for me a moment, commoner to king, I would be as happy as Uncle Remus.