Natural Histories (revision)

… We should study every kind of animal without hesitation, knowing that in all of them there is something natural and beautiful – Aristotle

Among the pinned dragonflies and brittle stars we search.
You trace your finger down the crooked spine of a dry seahorse.
Crocodile embryos float and bob in formaldehyde jars as we lean heavy on the shelf. Here, this is life.
The success of the others: the cockroach, the scorpion, and the horseshoe crab do not go unnoticed. And secretly we wish to crack open their glossy exoskeletons, to poke around in the spongy matrix of their bodies.
We wish to know.
In the far corner of the gallery the tiny apparatus of Aristotle’s lantern sits detached from the rest of itself, immobile like an unemployed drifter. It’s five-chambered evolution opens and closes like a little porthole, it sings opera and eats algae. This has purpose, but we, we are running out of time. We scamper to the snake and find our reflection on it’s glass, there we unzip our skin, you slowly, stepping out at your limbs. It was not so easy for me, I scratch off the remains with my nails. There is newness, a breeze. Here, we leave our bones, our membrane. Study us, we say, tell us.