Peggy Shumaker is the Alaska State Writer Laureate.  Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally.  Her most recent book of poems is Gnawed Bones.  She lives in Fairbanks with her beloved Joe Usibelli, and they travel widely.  She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop 

Shumaker says: "These poems grew from an Eco-Arts writing workshop I taught in Costa Rica.  They're part of a book called Genesis, Quetzal that will be published in Jan. 2013 by Red Hen Press.

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Blue Morpho

by Peggy Shumaker

At rest, false eyes

spot us,

your legs tasting

half-fermented mango,

rippling proboscis

sipping rank juice.

One startled slash--

bright shimmer--

ocean sixty feet down,

earth seen from space,

longing held

too long

song of one long gone,

that blue.

Not what you absorb, but

what you cant' take in--

that's what we see

of your beauty.