Butterfly Effect

Because your father stopped in Strandja park
to point out that whirligig of wings – blue
argus, he said, Ultraaricia
Anteros – you were dazzled forever.

Those wings wafted you here, ten thousand six
hundred kilometres away, to the
University of California,
Davis. Encyclopedia of Insects

in arm, you haul yourself up the stairwell
of Briggs Hall. Your frail sandal spindles on
the threshold – and you trip, a beautiful,
crippled Lycaenidaen specimen,

into the butterfly net of my arms.
Somewhere in Texas, a hurricane stirs.