Science Poem: Same Lobster, Different Death

A long time ago I wrote a poem about change: how necessary it is, and how excruciating it can be. How it comes on its own timeline, whether we want it or not.

Writing the first draft of this poem took years, and, appropriately, the poem has never stopped evolving. There will likely never be a finished version of this poem, only the last version that happened to be written. And yet—having spent more than a decade swimming in the waters of transformation with/as this lobster, having witnessed again and again the miracle of expansion and ascendance, of growth, or moving forward—I am still startled, when the next round of changes begin. I am still afraid. In those moments, it is a comfort to return to the lobster, to endure, and survive, this next death together.

The Death of the Lobster

I. 
The death of the lobster will commence quietly.

One night, she will awake and find her shell slightly too snug:
The lobster’s shell has stopped growing. The lobster has not.

Tomorrow, her shell will be tighter;
the next day, tighter still.

Her shell is everything that holds her, outside and in. 
It is the little legs that click her across her cave, 
the gears in her stomach for grinding fish into food.

The constriction will continue.
The lobster will lose her appetite.

Now she will waste away, a diminishing prisoner
inside a self-shaped cell. 


II. 
One morning, it will be time. She will pump her shell with sea water, 
more, more, more, until it cracks.

She will wrench the lining from her guts
and pull it from her mouth, a conjurer's string of scarves.

She will withdraw withered arms from rigid sleeves.
She is too weary to be doing this. Still, it needs to be done.

She will thrash her soft body through the rupture in her armor.
The world will go black.

It will feel like dying, and it is.
But it is not the end.


III.
Beneath her old split shell
she has grown another, flimsy and mica-thin.

When she wakes, she will flood this young covering
with water, filling the new shape until it inflates, 
solidifying by the moment.

Before long, she will have claws that will hold. Legs to stand on.
Teeth to feed her.

She will rise on new feet. She will raise the broken shell 
to her mouth and start eating.

The old house will never be home again. Yet from the rubble 
she will pick good bricks and rebuild.

*

A version of this poem appeared in Doubleback Review. Image via Unsplash. Inspiration by Trevor Corson.