Octopus, and: Cycle Route 9

Octopus I

With no internal shell you keepyourself together in a sac& the matter of attachment.

All you know you know by touch; shape,texture, and scale you draw intothe mouth of every flowering cup.

From pit to tip the suckers spring.Each flicker of skin crisscrossingyour path a chance to make contact,

a chance to draw a body notyour own into your care, or spreadout into theirs. The emptiness

you know you've labored to transpose.Your vacuum sets their course, carriesthese objects of desire toward

your hearts so that they hold; hemmed inin eight soft limbs and the bordersof concavities, folded fast.

The things that cling can't always bepredicted—slivers of mirror,bits of bone, curls, keys, a toy gun.

Attachment: is it grace or grasp?All things unknown familiar inthe peeling off & letting go.

II

Panicked, with inky melaninyou make a slipstream to get freeor make autotomy an art

rewriting your anatomy.Camouflage has failed, mimicrycannot hold off attack. Scoring

your arms with incisions those claws.Whose cuts are these? Who bruises, chewsat your skin, initiates this

severing? You watch it detach,float away from you. Coppered bloodinfuses the already blue.

Self-sabotage, the first and laststage of collage, the cutting upwithout the glue. The bitten limb

goes unattached, but is renewed.You didn't know you knew the artof self-repair until alone

those hundred days, watching somethinggrow. New cups bloom the length of you;mouths opening by small degrees.

The whipping fins can be withstood,the gripping jaws. All that issuesfrom the deep, in all likelihood.

Cycle Route 9

Our love it lives at 6.3 degrees.I stooped to measure it inside a dream.A meager distance. Not the moon in apogee.Still, from Earth it rises at a tilt unseen.The sun a decade older than beforefirst words (on the second-hand-furniturewarehouse concrete floor in BT4),our love some saw—still see—as forfeiture.

Love—it is not love until it's tested.So wrote Kierkegaard. Or sang that icon,Lady Gaga. Hills already crested,no sudden stops—our tires revolving onthe long canal towpath through Portadown& up to where we are, so startlingly set down.