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Pleated Inkcaps
Seán Hewitt
I am walking in the garden, barefoot –
a dream, perhaps (strange light) –
and all these blooms of glass, nocturnal,
are lifting from the soil, shivering
upwards on their milky stalks. Ghosts,
too, rise like this –
I have chosen one life, interred
countless other selves. The garden
is like a god
with a flowering mouth –
from Rapture’s Road, Cape Poetry, 2024

What you can’t get over is how soft the caterpillars are as you pluck them from the nasturtium leaves and they curl to runes in your palm.

You looked up what they turn into but no longer remember.

Typical. The mind won’t hold onto transformation, must be fed the same teachings again and again.

Leaves at the peak of summer now also covered in leavings of these temporary creatures. Bodies of the caterpillars are spotted for deception like fish, like the wings they’ll become; they are ravenous for the world, try to devour everything they can in the time they have.

You’ve arrived to the garden in usual fashion—between things, in a rush, mind distracted, holding fast to the nonchalance of the teen you once were who believes their parents will always be where they’ve left them, who has other things to do, to grow away from here, the world’s next shiny so alluring. You buzz around what’s rooted, as if everything is under (your) control.

Body primary, the caterpillar equates with need, the length of her touches the whole of what she moves through. Undulation. Multiplication of leg, pattern.

So much to admire here. You place them, each brilliant green skin a question mark, in the meadow, wonder how long until they find their way back. And how? How will they do it? Overcome the disorientation that arrives mid-life?

Every movement is forward. Every movement rhythm.

Do they sleep when you sleep? You know they don’t rise in the dark and consider you, scratch words at a glass table, your own rhythms leaving much to be desired. If they think of you at all it’s a brief moment, only—again—because of touch—foreign, sudden. Even their feet sticky, built to maintain contact with the home they were born to. And when you lift them from their centers, ends unmoored, what is lost? Is this the fate worse even than relocation? To break contact? To deny the body proximity, skin to skin of earth, body they will spin into another body equally temporary?

Though you’ve failed to remember their furture, what they become, they won’t forget their past. Memory survives metamorphosis. A Medium article and a podcast episode tell the story of one way we know this—because of the experiments of a boy named Jo Nagai from Kobe, Japan and the biologist in the United States he befriended, Dr. Martha Weiss.

Humans as well carry with us past experiences, who we used to be. Our histories and others connected to us. Whose histories live also in our bodies. Body memory. Generations back. Even when we forget, the body remembers. Others live in us. In our cells.

So, tell me: who is keeping you from flying?

Little Flower
Seán Hewitt
While I slept, you were there, little flower,
little lantern in the sullying rain, in the night,
all alone and singing, while I slept, while I woke
in the empty sleep. I thought a saint came
with a face, little flower, pale, and leant
above me. It shone in a gold hood. My cheek:
it touched me. I slept three years or more
but I was somewhere: little flower, you saw me.
And it was you who was singing, your mouth
little flower, an ember, blown red, then white.
And I was a ghost, at last, little flower, silken,
walking the bridge, and my hair was aflame
and at last my life was gone, and Come home,
come home, little flower, you called to me –
from Rapture’s Road, Cape Poetry, 2024

What the Body Knows

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