Humidity so thick that breathing feels like vaping. Cabbage whites puddle in the road—the hallucinatory, slow fanning of 21 pairs of wings.
cabbage white butterfly
4/23/2019
The first cabbage whites of spring! said no one ever. But their mad pas de deux is as full of zest as the tiger beetle gleaming green below.
4/17/2017
I can’t see the pear tree behind the house, but from time to time a few petals flutter down among the cabbage white butterflies in the yard.
8/30/2016
Five cabbage whites gadding about in the garden draw my attention to a tangle of crested buckwheat, red stems threaded through the bergamot.
8/16/2016
Two cabbage whites engage in a dogfight, or possibly a pas de deux. A leaf detaches itself from a lilac branch and turns into a hummingbird.
7/7/2015
Sunny and humid. A cabbage white butterfly with a strangely non-erratic flight path lands on a porch column: it’s missing half a wing.
6/15/2015
Yarrow, fleabane, silky dogwood… white is in style. But the cabbage white butterflies still prefer the purple remnants of dame’s-rocket.
5/19/2015
A tiger swallowtail flies past in one direction, a cabbage white in another. I sit reading Rubén Darío until everything seems symbolic.
7/27/2012
A phoebe dives at a cabbage white butterfly and comes up short. It zigzags after it, hovers, snaps again: only a tiny piece of white wing.
7/9/2012
Two cabbage white butterflies chase, briefly syncing their herky-jerky flights. The yard looks dusty, but it’s only the flour on my glasses.
6/20/2012
Six cabbage white butterflies dance in the heat. A halictid bee stumbles through the forest of hairs on the back of my arm.
6/8/2012
Bright blue sky. A cabbage white butterfly pauses in its zig-zag journey to circle a patch of dogbane leaves illuminated by the sun.
6/12/2010
Already by 8:00, the noontime heat is heralded by the aimless dance of a cabbage white butterfly, the dry rattle of a grasshopper’s wings.