A dozen that waited like pebbles


………………….. -- late spring, on schedule,
and when they do for fifteen days
the mountains are littered with a beauty
humans hardly deserve, littered I say
because they perch right on the ground,
on the mountain face, and there is one so beautiful
I hope never to learn its name because
it always appears as an unnameable marvel,
intricately tattooed upon a gray-blue wing,
the exact color of the slate rock that camouflages it.
When it spreads its wings its back reveals
ecstatic blue, and when a dozen that waited like pebbles
for your approach alight, it is the opposite of snowfall,
butterflies hardly conjures how the world is snowing sky.

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