TEOTIHUACAN

3 August

Drove out this morning in Elsa's car.
Small poet with smart black hair & immense hazel-gray eyes–she looks at you like any moment something unexpectedly brilliant will get said. Here the Aztec ruins dwarf us, great rippling feathered serpents twist along the Quetzelcoatl banisters. Elsa teaches Asian philosophy at the University, wears black sneakers & a vast loose-fitting black shirt. Walking the ancient boulevard out to the pyramids she & I compare thoughts on subtle points in Bhagavad-Gita–just two old brahmins by the Ganges–

Temple of Butterflies
    is the monumental
    pyramid
show your ticket and mount the high steep stairs
battered summit
peer through brown industrial haze at far mountains
    & try to memorize the landscape–
important for the next life.

It's mariposa in Spanish "perching one"
    says Elsa
French papillon
different root in Italian also–I recall–
        farfalla
Germans call it
schmetterling
so where did "butterfly" come from?
Them Indo-European rambling people, hard storm
out of Caucasus
horses & cattle driving the dust–
splitting up, some go east across Indus
    some west to Dublin, others south to the sea
and butterly emerges only–later–?
not known
back in the homeland. Birch. Oak.
Proto-Indo-European Trees.

This one pulses burnt orange wings
on grey stone
rufus & ivory eye-patterns rippling.
Looks like a monarch from California
    thousands arc in migration, high over the planet
    to collect in a single tree
    near Añno Nuevo

1200 species of mariposa
found in Chiapas. Enter into the notebook:
    Get a good field guide–