Migration

by Ann Cefola

–For Katherine Tompkins McCollom (1923-2019)

Each late September day, a monarch crosses my path, looping on air—
a trampoline, a highway, a portal; voyager from Vermont, milkweed-fat and nectar-full,
heading always—I turn to face it too—south, from plaited cornfields
relieved of spiked gold—knee-high by the Fourth of July—
over backyard tomatoes, weighted, red, bending toward earth;
across Interstates where currents of 18-wheelers push them up,
to a car hood at a yellow light; guided by the angle of the sun
toward the Sierras of Mexico, to an Oyamel fir it has never known.
You are always on your way somewhere, a sage writes.
You too: your thousand-mile trek a triumph of kin, to seed
the next generation who, after winter, will arise as one in bright thermals
orange and black, to retrace your route, not knowing why or how,
only the lift of instinct that insists Begin.

Ann Cefola is the author of When the Pilotless Plane Arrives (Trainwreck Press, 2021), Free Ferry (Upper Hand Press, 2017), and Face Painting in the Dark (Dos Madres Press, 2014); translator of Alparegho, like nothing else (Beautiful Days Press), forthcoming in 2024; The Hero (Chax Press, 2018), and Hence This Cradle (Seismicity Editions, 2007); and recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award selected by John Ashbery.