Two Poems

Every Summer, A Murder

of monarchs flocks the roads of Oregon. Thousands
thud on the windshield or stuck to the grate
of my low blue truck hell-bent on getting

home. But murder is for crows
while monarchs are, in fact, a kaleidoscope—
true in multitudes, or when splayed across

the car’s surface: the body swirled
into new configurations. Discal cells
separate. Plates of chitin unhinge

like fingernails. Pollen sprays, an untethered
forewing ghost-flies in the lift of wind. This road,
a wound: concrete that cuts flight

in curves and small catastrophes. How easy
they would have once flown, with only the old kind
of predator (parasite, wasp, bird, cold) and a home

in the distance. Before the pines were laid
out, the asphalt laid down, limbs carted off
to be settled for someone else’s sleep.

Now, on the tarmac’s skin, the monarchs
rest; they make themselves obstacle. I brake, but still
they scoop up in the tornado turn of tires, snare

in the wipers, fanning wing and thorax across
the glass: unraveled and re-spun. Every summer,
a murder, and who is to blame here: surely

the clear cut, the pavement-layers, the spitting speed
of other travelers. The civil engineer—his compass,
his level. Meanwhile, my foot on the pedal,

bodies
pile
up.

The abdomen spurts yellow on impact, another
colorful collide, like butter, it blinds
us but nobody slows.

This is a False Monarch

This poem
should be
thin, like
the abdomen.
The abdomen
which bursts
into cloud
of pollen. Impact
makes a body
dust. Once,
I saw
a heron
flume its way
upstream, wings
reaching opposite
banks, not blue
but slate.
Making air
a solid thing
beneath it.
In another
poem, a heron
is blown open.
There are girl-tears
for its wounds
but not for eighty
dead seagulls. In this
poem, also wings.
Unfastened
from so many
abdomens.
Collected on
my windshield
among
the body-dust.
They were monarchs
and then they were
not. Mimicry, of
the Batesian
sort. A cursory
imitation, meant
to protect
the less pretty
and less dangerous.
The California
Tortoiseshell
is no stained
glass. When asked
what was to be done
about the hundred
tattered corpses
(each undone matrix
of fat and chitin
hitching a ride
down the mountain
on our windows)
I was told
the Tortoiseshell
is not
endangered.
A body is worth
saving if rare
and original
in its splendor.
One heron, eighty
seagulls. Numbers
to be culled.
Where to place
all the dead
we cannot hold,
or refuse to.
The false
monarch, unsaved
by her tricks: see here
her unqueenly body
and all
its severed
parts.

This is a False Monarch

Should this poem be thin like the abdomen? Or spread across this page like their bodies on a windshield: constellations, words and small organs. Little known is these featherlights are made immobile by heat (and surely a parenthesis is another type of wing, the page a road to lift from). A state of torpor, a sister to the sleep of cold season, here called estivating. The unlucky ones (and there are hundreds) are forced to rest on the road, the road which is a passage into the mountain’s forests, for us. I swerve around their tiny openings, like the pages of books, ragged from a winter in hiding. Cars with paddleboards strapped to metal racks consider these bodies another debris and nobody slows, their recreation spattered in yellow (all that flowerblood undelivered).

I, too, have a boat, the lake another body I sink into, sectioned by a labyrinth of reeds: those tall hushes which hold the red-winged blackbird and his songs. I use the resistance of water for my own movement. I go past the point where others turn back. At the tributary, a light current: a finger swirled in a shallow glass. When I bottom out, the scrape of rock shakes something free from its stillness. A great blue heron, cool and alien calm. Its neck, a curved letter. The bird unfurls its appendages from where they lay bunched (impossibly) to the body, tips reaching both banks and then some. Wind emerges from it: each wing beating the air into something solid to push off from. Becomes a sonic pulse through the pines’ long needles, going where I know not to follow.

On the way home, smaller wings tear off. On the grate, under the wipers, across the boat’s bright plastic. It feels unavoidable, but of course, it isn’t. The world twirls out from wherever we decide to position ourselves. On the lake, on the road. Everything an echo that we call accident.

They’re not even monarchs. A lazy imitation at best, Batesian mimicry that only works at a distance. An alternative version. The California Tortoiseshell is no stained glass (less sherbet, less delicate). No noir lines, just splotches of last ink. They wear the slip of something beautiful in order to be avoided: by bird, car, or other predator. (This, the reverse of my world, where to be a flame calls danger forward). Though, this trick doesn’t save them. As they rest on the endothermic back of asphalt, their bodies are churned through wheel wells. Ripped as easily as a receipt. I think to collect them—not them, but their now discarded selves. Stack the wings in a book and press them into relic.

One of my favorite poems is also about wings, pages. Taneum Bambrick’s Biological Control Task. A truck of dead seagulls, at least eighty count. Shoulders folded apart / like wet book covers. The speaker watches as the men pull out the most prized of their gunned-down, although this one not split by their own hand. A heron. Blown open. The book of its body perusable. The speaker cries girl-tears; the men assume the seagulls too ugly to be grieved.

Unlike the monarch, the California Tortoiseshell is not endangered. Quite the opposite: a population that cycles between boom and bust. But after the third summer of continuous growth experts agree that something in this Oregon forest is off. Like the seagulls, soft numbers to be culled. We are always at work weaving the nets of our own absolution. Rarity, hue, or wingspan. A place to catch all the dead we cannot hold, or refuse to: the gnat clapped between palms, the bee trapped under a cup, the girl in a short skirt, the seagulls now thinned out. The false monarch and her tricks. The flame of something stunning, how it protects and it damns all in the same breath, of the same body (or hundreds).

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