Ode with Distant Prairie and Milkweed
What I feel when I see the lone monarch
in the plum blossoms
between storms in April
comes quicker than I can name it—
indrawing pain that is also pleasure
and myself widened and stilled—
tell me, is there a long German name
for that feeling? Zugunruhe
is wanderlust, the night flapping
animals in captivity do
as even in darkness they orient
towards where they in their wildness
would travel: their bodies alive
to wind and a planet’s
webbed meadows and wetlands
to a flock—in the case of monarchs, to a flutter—
to their plural—their season—
though any one creature
is still an infinity—
chromatic-wing-scales
ashimmer as milkweed
this butterfly must have fed on
in some distant grassland in its larval state—
Emily D. would have called
this revery, how one butterfly makes
a prairie of mind—a migration—an eon—
despite “disappearance of meadow”—
“heat-rise”—“asphalt”—“climate grief”—
—“bees few”—
this warming morning
this monarch lingers, dipping
into and out of
out of and into
pink-white flowers
tiger wings swift swift swift
This poem appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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Tess Taylor is the author of the chapbook The Misremembered World, selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship; The Forage House, which was a finalist for the Believer poetry prize; and Work & Days, which was named one of the best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Ilya Kaminsky recently hailed her as “the poet for our moment.” In spring 2020 she published two books of poems: Last West, part of the exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures at the New York Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press. She is a poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered.
