Then, finding you
was akin to finding a scarab
in a sand lot, and I turned up the blue spades

low on the lilac, combed
the buff tassels of bulrush along the shore
for your carapace. And now, larval turns

marvel, turns monster: a swollen horde
drills holes up through Missouri clay,
brutally precise as the spike

of enemy tent-poles. You brooded in the slit
bark of my acacias, then hatched
into the plot of garden I wouldn't yet dig

for seventeen years, when, a thousand miles away,
my teeth clenched in the barricade against
the first tongued kiss, when I pumped

my legs in rage to make the wormy swing-board
vault me skyward, bleeding for the first time, queasy.
Seventeen springs you tunneled in blind grubhood,

unlikely genius of the lacy, brain-like maze
I cut open with my shovel. And now you emerge
in the greatest act of will I've ever seen, blood-

blister eyes bulging under the chitin, splitting the callus
of your brow. You flex your shoulders to
a sudden bulk, and your spine splits at the seam,

freeing wings tagged on like clotted
flippers. On your pale-ivory forehead, between red
eye-bulbs now hardened to the touch, a triad of dots glitters

like a fey tiara, but already your brow
is darkening, obscuring these cabochon rubies; the snout
begins to curl toward your chest like a parrot's beak