EARTH SPIN

Blue Marble, you were a globe on a stand,

An old circular map above the chalk board,

A punishing weight on the shoulders of Atlas and Hercules.

You were too vast for legs to walk around,

Too deep for minds to comprehend,

Too mutable to be a safe haven. 

You were covered by the living and the dead,

Who clung to your surface like strangling, spiral vines,

Who rose upwards to escape your own fisted clutch.

Now you are suspended in a colorful glaze that hides the scars,

No more than an endangered disk set against an insubstantial night,

No more than a vanishing point in a mechanical eye.

© cmheuer, 2016

TIGER SWALLOWTAILS (for Sean and Meghan)

It is the pattern

On the large wings that makes my eyes sway;

Not the fluttering from blossom to blossom, nor the aerial acrobatics.

It is the fragile yellow brane

With black tiger stripes, blue patches, and orange spots.

Sun-flickered in a swift run just above the earth, the design delivers

Its knockout punch and leaves me stunned, dragged from flower to flower

By an alchemist’s golden promise or a sorcerer’s magic cloak

As if I were the one caught in a butterfly net.

My eyes lock onto one, but others command the sidelines,

Stand at rest with wings drawn straight up or spread out trembling,

Displayed and primed for instant flight among the opening buds

Spur memories of metamorphic brown caterpillars can grow wings,

Soar upon spring air, and lay claim to the enchanted symmetry

Of Blake’s "Tiger" even though their wings may have been torn and

Can never be repaired.

© cmheuer, 2016