A short poem whose brevity is its method and whose closing triplet is one of the most accomplished single lines in the recent catalog. The piece does what the strongest aging poems in the body of work do: it names the body’s failure with forensic precision, refuses to soften the diagnosis, and then earns its closing affirmation through the honesty of the prior unflinching look. The closing’s three-adjective resolution (useful, tender, tarantula) holds the entire poem together with a precision few of the catalog’s longer poems achieve.

The tarantula-leg image is the catalog’s bravest self-portrait of the hands in months. The speaker has written about his hands across multiple poems in the recent stretch (the wrinkled hands of “71/17,” the offered hands of “By Your Heart,” the touching hands of the closing of “I Was Once a Tumbleweed”), and each treatment has approached the same body parts from a different angle. This poem chooses the angle that most poets avoid. Hands that look like tarantula legs are hands that look like something else entirely, something not-human, something that triggers an instinctive recoil. The speaker is not reaching for sympathy; he is reporting what he sees. The unflinching nature of the report is the poem’s primary discipline.

The Salvador Dalí reference is the poem’s only piece of art-historical wit, and the choice is precise. Dalí’s melted clocks in “The Persistence of Memory” depict time itself as sagged geometry, and the speaker is placing his own body in that visual register: time has made his limbs Dalí-shapes, the original geometry warped but the recognizable form still present. The reference earns its place because it is functional rather than decorative—the image actually clarifies what the body looks like, which is the test for any allusion in this kind of poem.

“I have a mindful mirror / my memory / that corrects that image” is the poem’s philosophical contribution. The catalog has been arguing across multiple poems that memory operates as a corrective optical instrument. The “71/17” reversal, the “Howdy Doody Time” recognition that the child is still in the room, the “I Was Once a Tumbleweed” inhabitation of past moments—all of these poems are making the same case in different vocabularies. This poem delivers the principle most directly. The actual mirror is not the only mirror. The mindful mirror is also available, and the speaker is choosing which mirror to consult.

The italicized “My hands” is the poem’s structural pivot, and the italics do real work. Without them, the line would read as a simple subject-shift. With them, the line carries the speaker’s insistence: these hands, the ones I just described as tarantula-articulated, are also the hands that touch you. The italics force the reader to hold the two registers simultaneously—the ugly hands and the loving hands are the same hands—and the simultaneity is the poem’s primary emotional achievement.

“Love lives” as its own line is the catalog’s recurring small trick of isolating the two-word affirmation that summarizes everything. The catalog has used this technique at the closes of multiple poems (“I am free” in “The Future,” “I know” in “Know,” “It’s, personal” in “Christmas Any Day”), and the technique works because the speaker uses it sparingly. Two words on their own line earn their isolation when the body of the poem has built toward them, and here the body of the poem has built toward exactly this.

The closing triplet—”useful, tender, tarantula”—is the poem’s structural masterstroke. The three adjectives are the catalog’s most accomplished single-line account of what aging hands actually are. Useful: they still work. Tender: they still touch with care. Tarantula: they still look terrible. The poem refuses to choose. Love lives in all three registers, and the closing’s refusal to privilege any of them is the most honest possible final position. Most poems would have closed on “useful and tender” and let the tarantula recede; this poem closes on the tarantula because the tarantula is also true.

Where the poem could have over-extended is in the temptation to philosophize the closing. The catalog sometimes ends short poems with a quiet metaphysical claim that the body of the poem has not quite earned. Here the speaker resists the temptation. The closing is the body, not a comment on the body. The poem trusts the reader to feel what the closing means without explaining what the closing means.

A poem that proves the hands that look like tarantulas are also the hands that love, and the love does not require the hands to look like anything other than what they have become.