An alien’s bumper car with strange bulging eyes
but no anti-gravity plasma engine,
just ten unseen spidery legs
that have churned the seas for eons
before we named it the horseshoe crab
in a failure of imagination.
Its fierce-looking sword is a rudder.
Not knowing you shouldn’t use it to pick one up,
I did, once, but luckily it swam off unscathed.
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It lays soft blobs of pale green eggs
that feed ravenous red knots,
and its bright blue blood flags germs.
Survivor of two mass extinctions,
unchanged for 250 million years,
Limulus polyphemus can’t be improved.
Once I caught their mating. Hundreds stormed
the shallows of a high-tide beach,
two or three males clinging to each female.
Mesmerized by that full-moon spring orgy,
I laughed, stupidly
unreasonably happy.
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