At his moment of triumph, then Apollo found in his arms not the beautiful warm-fleshed nymph but a woman rough-skinned and cooling: becoming a tree, a laurel, whose leaves would become in turn his wreath of honor. There are things we can possess only by following them into the realm of disguise. There, we may be given a quarry altered, more pungent and wilder and stranger than we had surmised.

-Jane Hirshfield Nine Gates