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summer_jackelJosephine, my pet tarantula, is molting.
While I was doing other things, she
was toiling patiently, that she might ease carefully from herself
and now she is lying on her back, mostly still.
Her legs twitched weakly when I turned on the light
and saw her.
I turned it off again, after
I'd admired her tender new blackness,
her raw, red mouth and clear, unhardened fangs,
her splayed vulnerability. Spiders
shed their lungs, their stomach lining, all of it.
I wonder if it hurts. They don't complain.
And might we, sometimes, be
becoming something new; could we bear
to tear open our worn and faded selves,
to step, fragile and undamaged, from old safeties,
to lie quietly between death and renewal
to ask nothing but a little space to rest?
While I was doing other things, she
was toiling patiently, that she might ease carefully from herself
and now she is lying on her back, mostly still.
Her legs twitched weakly when I turned on the light
and saw her.
I turned it off again, after
I'd admired her tender new blackness,
her raw, red mouth and clear, unhardened fangs,
her splayed vulnerability. Spiders
shed their lungs, their stomach lining, all of it.
I wonder if it hurts. They don't complain.
And might we, sometimes, be
becoming something new; could we bear
to tear open our worn and faded selves,
to step, fragile and undamaged, from old safeties,
to lie quietly between death and renewal
to ask nothing but a little space to rest?
