Heart of the Octopus

What can be divided in the six chambers of his cloistered heart

that cannot be separated by the hands? Candelabra for the flickering

primordial flame. Nothing then like the fragile fingers of men, donned

with neoprene and gauges, reaching down to bustling reefs,

those of the doctoral student or the tender digits of honeymooners

banded with gold. Brightest of invertebrates, what would you know

of letting go? I would assume not much, with eight suctioned arms.

But after a male mates he dies. That’s something. I found myself hurting

as I watched a renowned Japanese sushi chef dismantle a live octopus

before the camera crew for three hundred dollars a plate. A nice way to say

it was dismembered. So why this compassion when I had always savored

the greasy calamari of seaside diners? I think maybe it was learning

of our similarities: the ability to hide, their use of camouflage and deimatic

display, the messy expulsions of ink. But to worry for an eight-legged

invertebrate might be tantamount to insanity while my country wraps up its twelve-year war and muzzle flashes light the alleys of Syria.

I had thought it was good to care for the small and tucked away creatures

of blanching reefs. So are they aware of a shift? Incremental changes

in degrees and the masked diver with his Medusahead of hoses.

Our love is of ice clinking in glass. Of the comforts a first world

can buy. So we feel on for words in the dark and snap them off at the participle,

like stalactites from tidewater caves, an octopus staring up

from pools of iridescent blue—a big brain doesn’t make her human.