Dawn

Sometimes your eyes are hazel, sometimes ink-blue,
and I never knew which are the contacts, or whether
you can have both, night-switch like bat or cat or fox
or fritillary butterfly – they say those are day-creatures,
that nights are for parchment-like moths that crumble
gold in your fingers after death. But butterflies know
night like any of us, or better: a beautiful, scary nothing
as their caterpillar selves curl up, rest, and rearrange,
re-become, with nothing to reassure them but instinct
and pattern. Sometimes, their orange backs flicker blue,
and maybe it is all that sky around them glinting off,
or the astronomy they have absorbed, comets and cosmos,
and they dance on your lips, and you know they feel it:
nectar of galaxies, a shell broken. They cannot get enough.