She doesn’t stop at just the one. She lays hundreds
of little white pearls, one after the other, in piles here

and there. Color-coded, the eggs turn green
and donut-shaped just before they hatch.

Once loosed from the shell, they are tiny lime-green
caterpillars less than half an inch long.

This particular moth larva devours willow leaves
like candy. Their tiny heads move up and down

the leaf as it disappears, bit by bit, down its gullet.
From there, the growth spurt begins and never ends

until one day, after half a tree’s worth of willow leaves
have disappeared, it stops. Then the caterpillar

climbs out of itself, abandons the husk of ‘pillar like
an old fur coat dropped in front of the new changeling.

Now, there is a rotund, shortened version of the cat’
that squirms and wriggles like Jabba the Hutt,

changing color in circles first, from bright green
to amber, and finally all at once to chocolate brown.

That is the chrysalis laying there under the dirt. What
was green and chomping will now sleep through winter

and then emerge next summer as a large moth
with scalloped wings who will never eats a thing.