Ottavo Arma Tenere

The female octopus declines like Latin. Her death
is a long arm of farewells; ancient, elegant. She loses
more memories than you will have in a lifetime. Her
kind little eye regards you sidewise
from a baggy head, a fleshy computer
powered by three hearts.
She convolutes into a Campbell’s soup
can, or squeezes herself into a glass Coca-
Cola bottle,
so she’s never homeless. She is the sleepy-
eyed stranger in the sea cave, waiting for a guest
with hundreds of cups at the ready. Sometimes,
drawn by distant shore music,
she crawls up onto the land so she can
take in the band, taking care to blend her-
self in with the sand. When trapped
in public, if she could speak, she might say,
“I am the sanest and most alien being
in the room.” If frightened, she shakes out her cloak
of ink in your face, and then shoom,
she funnels away and away
into the dark, back to where the brain
reconsiders its own skin. Her skin
reads you like a mood ring. She tastes you
through her skin. She has tasted your cigarettes.
She is the mind in the mountain that
has known you, but with time
will come to forget you. She shrinks down
inside her senescence, like a hermit
disappearing into her cloak. Towards the end,
she never even knows her thousands
of children. She swims around forever
in the big-headed ocean of lovely for-
getting, the shadow of her hood a pumping spread
into a skinny arrow, shooting across the moon’s
empty head, aimed at a vanishing tomorrow
that will never know
what her arms held.