Three cubed, twice

This ghastly butterfly thing arrived a few weeks ago as some sort of garnish to a couriered bunch of Get Well flowers.  An impulse saved it from the bin.  I shoved it, instead, into a dead pot atop the water butt.

I saw it this morning as I drew a deep lungful of clear winter birthday air.  It remains ghastly, but suddenly I saw the filigree of the wings and the colour gradient of the antennae…

…and I saw the designers whose work one weird Tuesday included this item…

…and the machine that extrudes the wire, and the machine that applies the graded iridescence, and the machine that bends the wire…

…and the packaging awaiting a few thousand such butterflies, and the great ship that crosses oceans with innumerable containers aboard, and the robotic stevedores and warehouses and forklift trucks, and the fingers of the person selecting this particular butterfly from among the thousands to push it into the particular bunch of flowers that ended up here…

…and I sensed the hope of the designers and the application of the machine workers and the diligence of the distributors…

…and I felt the money loaned to the producers and the profits made by the machine manufacturers and the taxes paid by the haulage companies…

…and I thought of the money I’d once upon a time earned and saved and which has been cared for and stored by one institution or another and which has somehow bought those shares and these shares and has invested in this portfolio and that…

… and I felt the tiniest shimmer as some infinitesimal fraction of my pension glittered in the filigree of the hideous butterfly…

…and I knew the unfathomable complexity by which we are all both buoyed and ensnared…

…and it is three times three times three… times two.