To a Friend in Love with the Wrong Man Again
It was never meant to be sensible,
fully understandable. The digger wasp,
for example, goes up to the tarantula
like a friend and the tarantula freezes,
allows itself to be inspected.
Then it digs the tarantula’s grave
while the tarantula watches. You, I bet,
would have guessed with a name
like tarantula, the tarantula would’ve been
the villain. But it is we who named
the tarantula and made the digger wasp
sound honest, hard-working.
And, of course, there is no villain,
only the scheme of things, only horror,
and occasionally the strange birth
of a butterfly and its short, gorgeous,
utterly careless season.
I should have mentioned the digger wasp
doesn’t kill its victim, but stuns it,
drags it to the grave, lays one egg
on its stomach, and closes up.
You see, the instinct is maternal.
The newborn wasp feeds
off the tarantula for weeks,
digs itself out at the right time
and enters the odd, wonderful world.
I’ve no advice for you, my friend.
You, who would take it—
as all of us would—and offer it
up to the heart, like a sacrifice.
Stephen Dunn, from Work and Love
