They move too quickly for memory,
as if the act of remembering were the one thing they refused to obey.
Yellow fire, in pairs,
their wings cutting invisible chords through the October air—
not quite bees, not quite spirits,
but messengers of motion itself.
The monarch drifts like a saint in exile, solitary, deliberate,
carrying his pilgrimage southward on a thread of faith.
The sulphurs do not travel; they whirl.
Their devotion is circular, immediate, untranslatable—
a dance so fast it becomes almost stillness,
the pure blur of presence.
He loves her.
And this is what that love looks like when seen through sunlight:
two wings, one intention, no sky between them.
They are the Now in motion,
the gesture that makes history without ever pausing to know it.
They do not transform potential; they enact it,
drawing from the infinite reservoir of the Unknowable Future,
leaving a streak of certainty where they’ve passed.
The camphorweed bends to greet them—
its yellow heads lifting, not toward the sun,
but toward the precise interval where life becomes memory.
Here the world is not efficient,
it is faithful.
Every curve of the wing, every lean of the stem,
every collision of color against wind—
all of it is motion protecting stillness.
And though I cannot catch them,
though the camera stutters and my eyes lose the trace,
I know they are writing.
Every flutter is a syllable; every orbit, a vow.
They will not be seen,
only felt—
as the tremor that reminds the Past it has been loved enough
to stay perfectly still.
Business Consultant