It’s true that spiders shed their exoskeletons

to give them room to grow. Look it up

on the web, the slow process of molting

sped up so many thousand times, the dark

hairs of the tarantula giving way

to a ghost-white glow of new joints, coal-black fangs

left hollow as envelopes that bore bad news, the fresh

bodkins white as an Osmond smile, because,

yes, everything old is sloughed off and left behind,

that shadow-self, that dusty X’d-off calendar,

the legs a jumble of broken pencils,

the abdomen a hungry woman’s empty purse.

 

So much energy lost in birthing yourself anew,

as Christ could attest, and the body unshrouded

should not be touched. In time, the larger self

toughens, thickens, hardens. But that push, too,

takes energy. For some, the shell dismissed

becomes consumed, the cannibal released

a sort of suicide. But search another web,

the one hung between old window panes,

sheltered from storm and dissipation,

and there you see what before now you assumed

a weaver’s corpse, but no, that weaver lives

with her own thinning shade, a papery past

escaped at last, like a chained thief from a dungeon

through the trap door of a broken carapace, and now

she is stronger than before, which, as with most of us,

means that much deadlier, that much more alive.