A cabbage white butterfly dances in a patch of sun—the method to a madness of perfectly random moves. An annual cicada’s slowly falling note.
cabbage white butterfly
Humidity so thick that breathing feels like vaping. Cabbage whites puddle in the road—the hallucinatory, slow fanning of 21 pairs of wings.
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.
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.
Five cabbage whites gadding about in the garden draw my attention to a tangle of crested buckwheat, red stems threaded through the bergamot.
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.
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.
Yarrow, fleabane, silky dogwood… white is in style. But the cabbage white butterflies still prefer the purple remnants of dame’s-rocket.
A tiger swallowtail flies past in one direction, a cabbage white in another. I sit reading Rubén Darío until everything seems symbolic.
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.
Two cabbage white butterflies chase, briefly syncing their herky-jerky flights. The yard looks dusty, but it’s only the flour on my glasses.
Six cabbage white butterflies dance in the heat. A halictid bee stumbles through the forest of hairs on the back of my arm.
Bright blue sky. A cabbage white butterfly pauses in its zig-zag journey to circle a patch of dogbane leaves illuminated by the sun.
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.