Larvae in lines

Chris Gillen

My world frayed as they began pupating,
taking on new contours, recomposing
far from the leaves where I had purposely
committed them. Clearly I had misread

their restless wanderings. Now they were
cocooning against my objectives,
building outside selves impermeable
to my apprehensions. Inside, they would

radically reconfigure, without needing
my approval. Surely I would cherish
the outcome of their transformations,
but how could I withstand the uncertain

stillness of the intervening lapse of time?
Time twines with motion, I learned by taking
physics. Parsing freefall by the second
was cathartic, yet my earthbound brain

was slow to spark, to conceive ungrounded
potential, to leaf through layers seeking
sub-currents beneath. Lately I’m afraid
to admit that larvae crawl into lines,

to concede them as bodies of senses.
Bodies ground everything onto the earth.
This I failed to question, until I stopped
in time to watch winged sparks emerge.

The Science

This poem explores change by considering activity of Lepidoptera before, during, and after they pupate. Larvae leave their food and wander in search of a place to pupate. Adults fly. Yet it is during the apparently motionless pupal stage that they make their remarkable transformation. The poem also considers movement from the perspective of physics, as captured in classical mechanics by the definition of velocity as change in displacement over change in time. Finally, the poem references molecular motions - charged ions moving across cell membranes - responsible for the electrical events in neurons that form the basis of cognition.

The Poet

Chris Gillen teaches biology at Kenyon College. His research, conducted in collaboration with students, explores ion transport proteins of insects, investigating their contributions to salt and water balance.

Next poem: Makemake by Dennis Owen Frohlich