for JPP

The Curator of Butterflies shares his narrow office with the Curator of Spiders.

Each has an ancient desk, ledgers, binders, texts and cramped specimen cabinets stacked to the ceiling.

In his: a dozen trays of Arctics, a score of Marbles. The Ringlets,

the Wood Nymphs, & row on row of the puzzling Buckwheat Blues.

The odor of paradichorobenzene permeates.

A trucker & lepidopterist since puberty, the Curator speaks of all his creatures

in Latin, stands six-three & asserts without contradiction that Santa Claus was, is & always has been a Teamster.

Afield and climbing power-line right-of-ways he sings the reggaes of Bob Marley, blesses

the revolution, & spots two Lilac-bordered Coppers on an old stump in that red road dust. They are doing, what he calls for the youngsters’ sake, the wild thing.

He puts it to music.

Opinionated but no dogmatist, he treats the radical assertions of firebrand cladists as nonchalantly as the rattlers he plucks from canyon trails: “You put your hand

under ’em and they think you’re the ground.

Don’t give you the least trouble.”

The ground he’s working now, systematically, lies between key species concepts: the biological

& the phylogenetic; Ernst Mayr & the computerized geneticists. The Curator is learning Russian, peering into deep time & old space: the prairies & dry peaks, the new islands, the arctic-montane arc running from Tibet to Colorado.

“Critters,” he says, “given the opportunity to disperse, will.”

Imagine then, as he does, the genetic turmoil: glaciers & dry interludes in lapsed time obliterating food plants – sweeping populations & whole habitats south into mesic valleys, then –

with each stade – drawing them back into the peaks & tumbled highland tundra to sort, shuffle and tap

the deck time & again.

Despite claims, assertions, & dogmas; the Curator knows all Is Degree and Flux.

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