The speaker looks in the mirror and sees different versions of himself: a teenage boy with zits, then a forty-year-old man with bags under his eyes, a big chin and nose, and a body that is both fat and muscular. The question "Do We see what We Love to See? / Do We see what We Hate to See?" suggests that what we see in a mirror depends on how we feel about ourselves.
Then the poem turns. A woman begins to appear behind the male face, and the body the speaker has lived in starts to feel like a hard shell, a cocoon with cracks showing. The butterfly imagery, with words like "Buttergirl" and "Femaleflyer," turns that change into something graceful and hopeful.
The mood moves from uneasy and critical to expectant and joyful. The repeated line "And She will Fly" ends the poem like a promise, and the speaker seems ready to become who she already is.