Games of Love

What would I wear if I were sad? he asks.
Coming to breakfast for instance, with my loss still fresh?
You, gone, inexplicably, and the silence ?

Another challenge. I didn’t know
that lepidopterists played games.
No Nabokov, he –
a manic, willowy boy,
already bent from peering.
I’d been captivated
by his intensity
his green-moss eyes.

He quizzes me on genus and species;
we vacation with nets,
to fields and marshy places, ripe
and buzzing with concerts of black flies,
mosquitos, leopard frogs.

An important personage… he prompts,
crouching before the pulsing wings.
Monarch, I say triumphantly,
Danaus plexippus.
No! Viceroy, he crows, triumphant.
See the lateral black line?

Men with no passions leave me yawning,
but sometimes I’d prefer another bent –
Civil War relics, perhaps,
or medieval lute. Well, this for that.
I play for pay.
Oh, you’re my Spicebush swallowtail
he murmurs at my ear

A Mourning cloak! I say.