Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium

If she was patient, and could abide
the sometimes putrid smells
and sights, she could use the word miraculous
to divine their transmutation
and render in paint, all at once,
each tedious stage of the procession
from egg to worm, pupa to moth.
In plates like this one Merian
defied the conventional wisdom
of spontaneous generation,
pairing each larval summer bird
with a plant on which she’d seen it feed.

In the fashionable rage for pinning
and naming, for tidying worlds
into cabinets and specimen boxes,
no one cared about insects – God’s castoffs
unnaturally birthed from cabbage
or meat. But she pursued the holy mess
of plant and seed, carapace and parasite,
recording habits and predilections
responses to touch or sound, their prayerful
looping forward movement.

In lieu of Dutch allegory, each plate
distills the art of attention. Just so,
the Amber Phantom’s waxen eggs
mound on the hardy cashew leaf.
And just below, a hairy, white as snow
looper splays flat as a pancake
though it will hatch seven or eight
weeks later. In Plate 33 the elaborately
patterned fig sphinx moth
hovers above a tree hosting several
different stages of the crawler: one
with yellow stripes that sheds a sky-blue skin
to spend a few weeks unhungry, still, a pupa.

Beneath her hand, the soul unfolds, spitting out
an amber thread and twisting slowly
into hazy oval sleep. Imagine attaching
the only self you know to the stem
of the delicate cashew flower and carefully
in the dark, unbecoming something else,
trading fourteen marching legs of onward
and feed for two pairs of scaled wings
a coiled proboscis and nectar.