Silvery Blue or Spring Azure,
I do not know who be you,
though I know your family well,
gossamer winged, Lycaenidae,
carried between Bob Quinn Lake
and the jade country up at Cassiar,
where the highway runs between
lodgepole and the memory of a mining town.

A butterfly, fluttering by,
antennae like dotted lines
drawn against the sky,
land for me, for you to see,
nothing to fear from a stranger
kneeling still on the shoulder gravel,
watching you open and close,
open and close, small and slow.

With your arrows pointing in,
a tiger fur pattern on a gradient
of outermost silver leading in,
washing into a glacial blue
that could have been ground
from the meltwater of the Cassiar Mountains,
or lifted from the underside of a lupine,
which is where your kind begins.

They call you social, flutterby,
and you prove them right,
with all your family and friends
tracing arcs and pathways
only your kind can predict and see,
gathering at damp patches on the road,
sipping minerals from the mud,
a small assembly of blues rising together
when the shadow of the truck passes over.

Though so many silken creatures exist,
too few show what such grace and fragility
can offer in a country
where the winters are long,
where the rock is folded and hard,
where the towns that men built
are going back to the forest.
So small and humble a thing,
in such a tough land,
the hubris of man has much to learn from you.