"During my very first walk into the forest at Batchian, I had seen sitting on a leaf out of reach, an immense butterfly..."
- Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago
At The Natural History Museum, London
- for George Beccaloni, entomologist
Pinned on the tray,
his wings outspread,
still and dry:
Ornithoptera croesus croesus.
'This may be the actual one'
you tell me, angling the glass -
the sooty texture
of immense wings
dazzles by its darkness.
Somewhere on the body
forensic signs, maybe,
of Wallace's careful fingers
as he drew this butterfly, living,
from the net? And his own heart
sent blood rushing,
so that "I felt
much more like fainting
than I have done
when in apprehension
of immediate death" -
all day afterwards
ah, how his head ached!
To that Mussaenda shrub
with its white bracts and long
yellow orange-eyed blooms,
lured by scent and sight,
croesus will come for nectar.
Closed up, he makes just a patch
of leaf-thrown shadow,
or an oblong black-veined leaf,
yellow-green in sunlight.
Open, the bright petals
on his outspread wings -
orange sprays, yellow dots,
amid yellow and white and orange -
hold his body safe
in a bill-distracting corolla.
As I catch a trace
of Wallace's fine-tipped quill
on the tiny round of the label
and the dull glint of the pin
through that wizened thorax,
I think of a mind's movement
stilled between pages,
as dead, as rich -
ready in another mind
to fly, and settle.
Ornithoptera croesus croesus collected by Wallace in 1859. This is probably the first male he caught: The one which gave him such a headache! Copyright: The Natural History Museum, London.
From Anne Cluysenaar's beautiful book of Wallace-related poetry, Batu-Angas (2008).