Metamorphoses by Ovid (8)

She runs from the god, and just as his breath reaches the back of her neck the change overtakes her: bark climbs her thighs, her fingers stiffen into twigs, her hair shivers into leaves, and Apollo, pressing his mouth to the warm new wood, feels her heart still beating somewhere underneath. Daphne into laurel is one of hundreds. Ovid threads the whole of pagan myth into a single unbroken poem, from the first sorting of chaos to the streets of his own Rome, and everywhere the same thing happens: a person pushed past the edge of what a body can hold, and the body giving way to it. Narcissus thins to a flower over his own reflection, a weaver's pride hardens into a spider, a raped girl is silenced into a bird. The wonder is how tender Ovid stays toward each one. Nothing in him holds its shape, and that, he seems to know, is exactly what it is to be alive.