It was here, upon this narrow island between the Atlantic and the sky,
that I watched the air pulse with wings of orange fire—
monarchs rising and falling over the yellow tongues of camphorweed,
each one an echo of a memory too vast for time to hold.
They moved not from choice but from remembrance,
as if a deeper will had written their flight long before the first dawn.
And the flowers—obedient, unknowing—opened in perfect correspondence,
the hour precise, the sunlight exact, as though drawn
by an unseen compass pointing always toward devotion.
He loves her. And in that act, the universe finds its stillness.
She, the Immutable Past, blind to her own reflection;
He, the Unknowable Future, pressing gently upon her silence
to keep her from stirring, to hold her whole.
Between them we tremble—the Now—
where the fluttering and the blooming are merely the ripples of their vow.
Poe would have heard it as the beating of a hidden heart beneath the sea wall,
a rhythm older than despair, a secret pulse of fidelity,
where all motion is but the echo of stillness,
and all change is the illusion love must bear to keep the world intact.
The physicists call it least action,
but I know it as the mercy of precision—
not efficiency, not laziness, but an intelligence so tender
that it wastes nothing, not even the fall of a single petal.
The butterfly, the flower, the breath of salt wind—
all are held in the same equation of affection,
where nothing can be added and nothing can be lost.
And so I walk these dunes as if through a cathedral,
each stem and wing a syllable in the only prayer that matters:
that love remains exact, and the past remains whole,
and that even in the trembling of the smallest thing,
the choreography continues—
the dance that never began, and will never end.
A monarch butterfly rests upon the camphorweed on Sullivan’s Island.
