In the course of researching my butterfly book, I read as many butterfly poem as I could find – and most of them, barring Emily Dickinson's fantastic flights and Janet Lewis's wonderful The Insect (you'll find it at the end of this post) – were pretty unsatisfactory, tending to be more about the poet than the butterfly, and almost never evoking a particular species. Well, now I've found two poems (and potentially 61 poems) devoted to a singles species – the Monarch.
The two poems are in an interesting Everyman's Library anthology, Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems – poems that, to quote the Introduction, 'respond to earlier poems – they argue with, elaborate on, recast, poke fun at or pay tribute to their inspiration'. The two Monarch poems are in the section 'Variations on a Theme', though they could equally well have been in 'Rebukes and Rebuttals', or indeed 'He Said, She Said'. The first is by Robert Duncan, a poet I might well have read in my deluded youth when I was very taken with the 'New American Poetry', but I remember nothing of his. He was a big figure in the avant-garde literary and artistic world in his day, and indeed on the gay scene (according to Wikipedia, he had an affair with Robert de Niro's father, an abstract painter). Here is a charcoal drawing of him in old age, by R.B. Kitaj –
– and here is the poem:
Roots and Branches
Sail, Monarchs, rising and falling
orange merchants in spring's flowery markets!
messengers of March in warm currents of news floating,
flitting into areas of aroma,
tracing out of air unseen roots and branches of sense
I share in thought,
filaments woven and broken where the world might light
casual certainties of me. There are
echoes of what I am in what you perform
this morning. How you perfect my spirit!
almost restore
an imaginary tree of the living in all its doctrines
by fluttering about,
intent and easy as you are, the profusion of you!
awakening transports of an inner view of things.
(That's a terrible last line, isn't it?) And here is the poetic response of Alison Hawthorne Deming – a much better poem than the original, I would say:
The Monarchs, 58
Sleep, Monarchs, rising and falling
with the wind, orange children tucked in your
winter bed,
teachers of patience and faith
dreaming in the eucalyptus dark,
accumulating in your cells the photons that tell
you when to move, a sense
I share in mind,
that makes the blue world
light up, electric. It's too late
to just let the world be and think
it will mend. Yet how you, little nothings, perfect
my spirit!
almost erasing
the actual ruin of living and all its doctrines
with your evolved sleep –
delicate and frail as you are, the profusion of you
awakening in me soundings of the past
that name the future.
