Christina Pugh

And at the picnic table under the ancient elms, one of my parents turned to me and said: “We hope you end up here,” where the shade relieves the light, where we sit in some beneficence—and I felt the shape of the finite after my ether life: the ratio, in all dappling, of dark to bright; and yet how brief my stay would be under the trees, because the voice I’d heard could not cradle me, could no longer keep me in greenery; and I would have to say good-bye again, make my way across the white California sand and back: or am I now creating the helplessness I heard those words express, the psalm torn like a map in my hands?

I. MORPHO MENELAUS Foiled acqua- moiré wings the butterfly’s beauty- mark hydraulic in its purposes   his hair’s flame lifts you snarls you II. MORPHO ACHILLES Sea-bed in semaphore / an eyepiece     wing-span delft dye vat-dipped shingle scintilla        :        truant and acclimate     enfold or infuriate:     SOS: Don’t surround Don’t surround yourself with yourself III. MORPHO RHETENOR HELENA Neon heather sky- lit bluer than moiré: inseam of street trash     lush mask- contour     soul- strait fungible as raiment in the crawlspace     radiating amatory birds’ egg bulls-eye

Something I learned about agape when I was young: the Iliad tells us fellow-feeling is finite in communities. Brotherly love becomes a number that has to be divided among persons—so if you’re too kind to others, that might explain your neighbor’s graft. I sometimes wonder if perception is the same; if the quantity of percepts, or our trove of eidetic things, is not limitless but rather constant: the measure, say, of a sunlit field. So if we dip like deep-sea divers to the world, we’ll have to use a purse-seine to sieve our sense impressions. We’re hoarding the image at our peril. That bluest scilla smeared by a finger writing in the grass? Endangered. Poetry’s work is not to ravish, but diminish.