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Metamorphosis<br />
Susan V. Meyers<br />
Because butterflies are beautiful<br />
I have no fascination for moths,<br />
their thick-blunt<br />
wings buttered brown<br />
as cinnamon, or rusted<br />
blades. I don’t care<br />
for the miracle of their birth:<br />
the parental corpse, the forgotten<br />
apple, like a planet now. <strong>The</strong>y feed<br />
on my accident. <strong>The</strong> underside of the bed,<br />
like a margin, becomes<br />
universal.<br />
Did I ask for this? Did I invent<br />
this? Some night lapse<br />
of the brain, some dream?<br />
And then their appearance<br />
like a subtext, below.<br />
I will clean everything.<br />
I will not tolerate their rushed cocoons,<br />
their unannounced<br />
arrival. <strong>The</strong>se white worms weaving<br />
themselves into my cotton sheets, my dreams.<br />
Poised—in the interval of their<br />
transformation—rigid<br />
as a ballerina, or bone.<br />
Better, if they had been butterflies:<br />
beautiful, seasonal, whole. More symbol<br />
than insect. What if butterflies<br />
had flown up out of my mattress one night?<br />
What if one had brushed my sleeping cheek, forearm, thigh?<br />
Could I have guessed: butterfly or moth?<br />
What difference<br />
would that have made, waking?<br />
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