World Enough Writers Anthology Editor: Sierra Nelson
Sierra Nelson is an award-winning poet, performance artist, MacDowell Fellow, and founding president of Seattle’s Cephalopod Appreciation Society. She has taught Humanities courses at University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs, and her poems accompanying ichthyologist Dr. Adam Summers’ fish skeleton photographs have appeared at the Seattle Aquarium, the Slovenian Natural History Museum, and beyond. Her books include The Lachrymose Report (PoetryNW Editions) and collaborative I Take Back the Sponge Cake (Rose Metal Press).
Poem from Three Hearts: An Anthology of Cephalopod Poetry
by Sierra Nelson
Cephalopod Meditation
Inspired by the slides of Dr. Roland C. Anderson (1947-2014), the
Seattle Aquarium’s renowned octopus expert and longtime friend
of the Cephalopod Appreciation Society.
How long have you been hiding from yourself?
Coiling inward protectively, squishing yourself into
convenient, hard shapes?
When they didn’t understand how you saw things,
did you start to see yourself as they thought you were?
Did you forget you could see with more than just the eye?
Your whole skin sensing flashes of light and passing shadow,
giving and receiving colors like touch?
What other parts have you forgotten,
still breathing inside of you?
What vulnerable underside
is quivering its suction cups?
Was this even one of your three hearts?
How many tears cried, and on what scale?
What can you discover in what’s been discarded:
the midden of your past, abandoned shells and carapace?
And what have you been clinging to, afraid to let go?
Desire moves, all muscle, with sinuous strength.
Did you fear you were some kind of monster?
Did somebody call you that?
Are you trying to keep it all under control?
And how is that going?
Have you come to the far edge of the life you’ve known so far—
sensing something in yourself beyond the cold glass?
Have you been trying to communicate,
by chromatophore and gesture,
the awkward, beautiful, futile, dance of it?
Is it all a dance?
[dance]
[dance]
And what about love?
Had you found it before?
Did you make a map to try to find it again?
We are only here such a short time,
before interrupted by illness, accident,
or subsiding into pale senescence.
What if these moments are your last?
What are you thinking? Making?
Who are you caring for?
What are you tending now to send into the future?
What words, what images, what hope—
tucked into small fragile vessels like messages in a bottle,
growing their own chromatophores, secret signals?
And how will you be remembered?
