Octopus on a Sea Dock

Onism: awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience
from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

It floated out from a sea bucket
into the silver spilt water
of the sea dock we’d come to visit,
so quiet at our feet
that the fishermen nearby were oblivious,
their fishing poles
casting long silken tendrils to the sea.
I had forgotten it until now, sitting
here at my closed window beneath a sky
white, I’m told, with the drifting
particulates of a far fire: trees and houses
burnt somewhere close to that dock
thousands of miles west.
We slid our hands beneath it,
even as we kept asking ourselves,
jellyfish or octopus?
our hands grazing the splinters
of the sea dock and then the tangle
of its limbs, its weight in the air
we balanced, still fearing
that this creature might be all water,
might be all swimming bell and dart
of the jelly fish, my mother entangled once—
I am remembering the story now—
with a man-of-war propelled
to a beach in Okinawa
where my father served.
She never showed us those scars,
the pad of fat she complained of
hidden by the fabric she adjusted for dresses or pants,
pinning it over the tiny crinkled bulge
at the top of her thigh that I share.
But I was thinking of that sea creature,
how the bulb of its head was like the glass
stopper someone blew into shape
for the flask I bought by another sea,
just a little while ago,
and put on my window sill,
where it breathes and breathes,
inner and outer light I keep glancing at.
Someone said we merely inherit
or borrow the best of ourselves,
the jelly fish it turned out not to be
floating within me this moment
like a snow globe of glass,
here and not quite here.
Small as the hand I remember
the octopus, dark, I’m thinking now,
as if a sad little soul bubbled out of it,
our two girls, who had not yet
outgrown us, shrieking in such joy.
Why do I feel these little tendrils of grief?
We were shouting, shaking everywhere
but in our hands, so still we held our palms
as one miraculous arm and then
another encircled us.
I once saw in the dark plain
of a photographer’s rigged mount,
the heart and belly of a glass frog,
all its embryos aligned and not yet
drifting, not yet knowing
the high wavering tree
they would soon climb, as I did once,
sitting in the wind, a girl
eating apples, so young then, so
not here now, and the embryos
of that glass frog queued
to be drawn out, I think,
like the long skeins of glass
I once watched a glass blower breathe into,
the glass so hot from the fire, so
full with everything I am seeing
behind and before me: the sea dock
and the sea and that tiny octopus
we held so gently, leaning over
the water with our daughters to let it go, the sky,
I remember it beautiful, I remember it
clear and glass, beating and beating.