All my poems used to end in sky

but now they end in sleep
where I might dream of the giant Pacific octopus
I once saw at the Seattle Aquarium,
rust red fluorescing to electric blue and back,
legs hungering at all of us passing by.
When I read that a female octopus lives alone
her whole life until she mates, then sits
guarding her clutch of eggs, not feeding,
until they hatch and she, starved, dies, it seemed too easy—
my kids next to me, reaching their hands to meet
her suckers safely on the other side of glass.
I have not died for them, although I would,
I tell myself, push them from the path
of the careening truck or body block the bullet,
but this has not been required—
I am not evolutionarily programmed to dwindle
to a ragged shape on seafloor, pale and spent
outside my den, waiting for a shark
to tidy my carcass away. No.
But when I hear that an octopus carries
two-thirds of her cognition in her arms,
arms that can telescope to twice their reach—
their slime-covered suckers letting them taste and see
whatever they find—I feel yes.
Yes, as my kids spread from me now,
fingers sticky with lunch, into every crevice
of museum—the tide-pool touch tank
where the hermit crabs might pinch
and the sea urchins will draw blood,
the underwater dome circled by venomous
dogfish, the deep open-air pool, where harbor seals hunt
and play. An octopus can survive
if one of her arms is taken—
torn off by predator or accident—
will even grow a new one in its place.
But what happens to the touches and thoughts
that go with it? Are they the fine first curls
and milk teeth long divided from the nursing nerve,
kept insensate in a jar atop the dresser?
I watch her, wondering if I’m the thing
she wants to know and at the same time flee
as she tents her muscles into horns, then subsides,
chromatophores within her skin expanding
and contracting to match the color first
of a pile of pebbles, next my shirt,
and finally a neighboring anemone.
But let me not anthropomorphize.
I am here, human in the aquarium,
my children spreading themselves as wide
as they can from me, then retracting back
for a snack or to report what they’ve seen,
all of us changing shape beneath
the watery lights, blurring us into an almost-liquid
almost-animal sleep.