The opening four-line stanza performs the catalog’s most candid self-portrait of the speaker’s hands. “My hands / are starting to look contorted / like tarantula legs. / Functional, but profoundly aged.” The tarantula-leg simile is the catalog’s least flattering self-image, and the unflinching nature of it is the poem’s primary discipline. Most aging poems reach for gentler comparisons (wrinkled, weathered, weathered like driftwood). The tarantula choice insists on the strangeness of what hands become at a certain age—segmented, slightly fearsome, articulated in directions that suggest a different organism. “Functional, but profoundly aged” delivers the medical assessment that softens nothing but acknowledges everything. The hands work; the hands are not what they were.

“Fortunately, / other parts and limbs only melt / like a Salvador Dalí masterpiece. / Slightly distorted” extends the visual register from arachnid into surrealist painting. The Dalí reference summons the famous melting clocks of “The Persistence of Memory,” and the speaker is placing his own body in that visual lineage—shapes that no longer hold their original geometry, parts that have sagged or warped without quite ceasing to be themselves. The “Fortunately” is the line’s quiet wit. The speaker is grateful that the rest of him is only Dalí-distorted rather than tarantula-articulated. The hierarchy of ugliness is the poem’s small joke.

“But I have a mindful mirror / my memory / that corrects that image” is the poem’s structural pivot. The actual mirror would show the tarantula hands and the melted limbs. The mindful mirror—memory—shows what the body was, and the memory overwrites the present image with the prior one. The catalog has been making versions of this argument in the aging poems (“71/17” with its reversal of digits, “Howdy Doody Time” with its child-still-in-the-room), and here the principle is named directly. Memory is corrective optics. The speaker is not fooled about his current appearance; he is choosing the image that memory can supply.

The italicized turn arrives at the poem’s emotional center: “My hands / still caress your skin, my muse / with warmth and tenderness.” The italics on “My hands” lift the phrase off the page and insist on it. These hands—the contorted tarantula hands of the opening stanza—are also the hands that touch the Muse. The same instruments that look terrible perform tenderness. The catalog has been edging toward this kind of acknowledgment in “By Your Heart” and “I Was Once a Tumbleweed,” but here the contradiction is delivered without softening: the ugly hands are also the loving hands.

“Love lives” stands alone as its own line, the catalog’s recurring trick of isolating the two words that summarize everything. The verb is present-tense and unconditional. Love lives, full stop, before the closing line specifies where.

“In these useful, tender, tarantula hands” is the poem’s structural masterstroke. The three adjectives are the poem’s complete account of what the hands have become: useful (they still work), tender (they still touch with care), tarantula (they still look terrible). The triplet refuses to choose between the registers. The hands are all three things at once, and love lives in them not despite the tarantula but including the tarantula. The catalog has rarely produced a closing line that holds three contradictory adjectives in equal weight, and the technique is the poem’s quietest gift.