In a Hudson Valley winter apple orchard, beneath one apple tree in a row of apple trees, snug inside your egg, inside a rotten apple hidden beneath red leaves, you lay abed breathing your slow larval sleep, dreaming red, without reason, dreaming delicious, longing too for the lost @3she@1 of your own delirious body, through the long cold season. Then, as pretty or ugly as you want to be, you chew your way out of your own lace skin, beginning to dream @3lover@1, mindless of the fall, mindless of your puparium cover -- doing your own maggot dance. Larva-headed, cocky and relaxed, and clear-winged, you tunnel now into the living corpse of winter earth. You proceed where winter hits with the least amount of breast-pounding snow, under the tongue of a good layer of earth. And in spring, (I'm informed) you are transformed, (if you survived the wasps) into a proud pupa, fit to sit up, heavy and big as you're going to get. All to this end: to wait quietly on perhaps the same apple tree till @3she@1 sees you waiting and decides you are the one, the only one she wants to catch her @3ovi@1. On the lookout for birds, and to let other females know you are spoken for, she leaves a trail of her droppings all around you so they will know to whom you belong. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...PARAGRAPHS: 16 by HAYDEN CARRUTH ODE ON THE SPRING by THOMAS GRAY NATURE'S QUESTIONING by THOMAS HARDY SAMSON AGONISTES by JOHN MILTON THE HOUSE OF LIFE: 72. THE CHOICE (2) by DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI THE FIFTEEN ACRES by JAMES STEPHENS |