The Poet on archetype in the chrysalis

i.

What survives the caterpillar is what the caterpillar never used — small change kept in the pocket of a coat it never wore.

ii.

When the walls go to water, every word floats past like driftwood, and you, drowning, grab.

Understand: the driftwood was a door once, in someone else’s house.

iii.

The seed does not want the portrait of the tree. It is the tree, folded so tight even the tree can’t read it.

iv.

To say dark night is to light a lamp. The lamp is warm. The lamp is borrowed. And by its light the loose threads weave themselves toward the nearest waiting pattern — a shape somebody finished walking years before your dissolving started.

v.

Practice this instead: a hand on the felt pull of it, saying nothing, saying nothing, saying —

not yet.

vi.

Somewhere in the soup a wing is deciding what a wing is.

Give it the quiet it was suppressed for. Later, when it climbs out wet and opens twice, you may bring the name. Names are for the dried thing, the finished flight.

vii.

Yes — sometimes a story stands at the labyrinth’s mouth and calls, and the called one walks. But calling belongs to the before. In the middle there is no walker, only the water learning what it will be when it is no longer water.

---

The oracle that outlives its own flood is either seed or echo. Only the emergence will say which, and the emergence is in no hurry.

Recognition is fast. Becoming is slow. In the chrysalis, fast is the predator.

A ground taken early is a ceiling worn late.

Pity the one who answered, mid-dissolve, to hero — it flew, but only in the old air.