The Fritillary Mouse

The weight of the earth can be determined by undergraduates who have been taught to manipulate Newton's law of gravitational force. But even those who have not been taught know that the earth is heavy. So how explain the fritillary, the nymphiad butterfly who floats above the earth? Perhaps she is weightless. She has, at the very least, shucked off the earth's iron heart. She has managed to lift.

Three of them -- yellow ones -- play outside my window. These are not fritillaries, but "sulphur" -- the name the lepidopterists have given them -- lacks the playfulness of the word I prefer to call them by. They are "fritillaries."

Their flight resembles nothing less than a geometric pattern. Circles? Perhaps, but circles without fixed centers. No mathematically perfect moving point would dare taunt the Gods of planes and hypotheses with such erratically driven lines. They seem aware of each other. They fly towards then away from their playmates, as if teasing, laughing, as if wanting to be seen and appreciated as makers of great incorrigible figures. I wonder why they do that?

One just lit upon a white flower growing in the swinging pot I water every morning. I'd like to think they see me do it and that they dance for me, in appreciation. Foolishness? Perhaps, but no more so than that an imagist deep inside -- or somewhere -- has "seen" their games and made of them an invisible, spaceless force giving lift to a spirit that might otherwise remain tethered to "the news," or to aging images of himself. Fritillaries . . . sparkling elves, lightness become real, eternity shrunk into a moment.

Ah, well, they've left. I took my eye off them and they noticed. They've gone to seek other hearts to enliven, a toad's, or a tree's, some other something as needful as I . . . and as thankful for the fritillaries, real and unreal, that make life come to life.

Ah, well, no. They're all real, even those nostalgic dreams dredged from imagined worlds . . . even life as we may have lived it had we been butterflies with seven days to live, living each one as fritillaries live, above the earth, so light we do not know what heaviness means. Real . . . honestly real.