Marianne Boruch

 

Lament

At Safeway, on ice, the octopus—
great bulbous purple head
folded over, arms too many
and haphazard, pulled up like someone needed
to sweep the gleaming case right now.
Among tidy shrimp
and yawning tuna, it's the sideshow
freak, a thing
stopped and falling through
everything it was, past
strange to terrible to odd, dim star
between sun and moon though
the sky's all wrong, neither
day or night,
this cool fluorescence.

How old is he? I ask the kid
behind the counter, who shrugs, who
half-smiles. I look for the eye buried
in the blue-green folds. So many
eons in there. So many years
like shifting color turned to charm
the eternal underwater where it might
be asleep like that, or simply pretending—
Awful eerie sea life morgue . . . .

But what if I claimed
the body? What if I took it and kept
walking, crossing the dismal
parking lot, its weight against me, dear
tangle of arms in its
paper shroud. What if I stood then
and fumbled with the keys, and gave it
to the darkness
filling the old back seat.
And blessed it twice, the second time
too long and endless
as water. What then—
And who would I be. And where
would I drive.