here is the boat,
white and small
with tiny men,
with impotent nets
limp as poverty
that when it ends
takes more than it needs.
In midnight
the circle of light in the boat
is filled with men and white arms,
with ropes moving like promise,
and nets pulling up the black and icy waters
a blue crab, tender inside its shell,
a star from another night of darkness than ours,
a glass-eyed halibut
so much larger than death
that the boatman must shoot it
and shoot again and in night,
fire flashes from the gun
like a flower that blooms
madness
and is gone.
Every yield is shining and alive,
and then at daybreak
the octopus,
the men pulling at it, but its many arms
fight hard, hold fast and tight
against the held boat,
in struggle with air and men,
holding as they scream. They want it.
They need it.
They are fighting.
It is a valuable thing.
It will be used as bait.
It will sell for two hundred dollars.
It will be cut into pieces,
will be taken
from the cut insides of halibut
and used again.
The men are still screaming,
fighting, but it cleaves to the white boat,
wearing the shine of water.
Its eyes do not look at the men
as they hook it with grappling hooks.
It faces the black, cold waters
it has been pulled from.
The tentacles fold over themselves
and inch down,
with the men screaming,
jabbing at it. I want to stop them.
I want to tell them what I know,
that this life collects coins
like they do
and builds walls on the floor of the sea.
It does not see their need
rolling back above water,
the boat so white, so empty
even full.
And while water breathes up and back
it finds its way
into the ink-black skin of water,
crossing other currents, floating
like a man’s dream of falling
into worlds he will never know,
into the bending dark weeds
where rain lives
where crying lives,
where broken waters heal themselves.
I look inside the dark cold ocean.
Inside is the octopus that shone like sun
in a changing skin of water.
It turned red with fear, then paled
before climbing down the boat.
It was naked,
it was beautiful
like an angel
with other wings,
its arms were those of four mothers
desperate for life.
My child saw a tentacle come
over the boat.
She is the girl who loves fish;
She doesn’t understand death.
She has not knocked on its door the way I have.
She does not know the world is made of arms.
She keeps the lens of the halibut eye,
looks through the perfect glass sphere
and sees the wide curving world
all at once.
Hungry, we are hungry for the whole world.
We are like the small fish in the sea,
the ones who swim into the mouths of larger ones
to take what’s there.
I want the world to be kinder.
I am a woman.
I am afraid.
I saw a star once, falling toward me.
It was red
with brilliant arms
and then it was gone.