Back to Issue Seven

 

"Uraba Lugens" by Alison Hurwitz

Uraba Lugens

       And so, what else can you do

       but let yourself be broken

       and emptied? What else is there

       but waiting in the autumn sun?

               —Carolyn Locke, "What Else"

This is not a new story. Time molts us.

       Fiber, cartilage and chitin, imaginal discs, memory, all

morph their way to metaphor. Before it is wing-ready, Uruba lugens sheds

       whole exoskeletons, yet keeps its previous headquarters attached,

wears successive husks of history like hats. Blank oculi stare out

       above its eyes.

 

Watch that capitated shape head up the branch

       to munch each eucalyptus mouthful. See it strip

green epidermal substance down to vein through walls, chew

       windows until what had been leaf becomes a frame for light.

Scrunch and pull: digest of trajectory. This should all feel familiar.

 

We eat our lives full-mouthed and hungry for horizon.

       At the edge of next, we’re tempted. Some instinct pushes us

to want whatever waits around the bend, yet our smaller i’s come with us,

       buried in a gaze: they look out of every face.

 

What if we could not be changed without displaying our

       discarded incarnations, our shed selves heads above us; stacked into afterthoughts?

Abandoned to their desiccation, they’d perch awkwardly, tensed for reinvention:

 

       each headcase larger than the last, each empty gaze concaving, walls too cramped

for transformation. Child shed to adolescent, adult to crone—the patterns atrophy, crumble slowly

 

into silence, until at last: Space, enough to open. Space, to leave. Space, to lift.

 

 

Photo credit: John Tann from Sydney, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons