What could you possibly have been dreaming of
as you slumbered coiled there, tentacles
furled about your large soft brow, bashful
and pink, ruminating in the back corner
beneath an arched shelf of antelope ribs—
snugged between headless-bodied broods
of sage grouse, the icy bright pillows
of Shur-Fine lima beans and the buttered
currency of carrot medallions? What were
you thinking down there in my parents’
basement, blue blood’s pulse stilled to a wiry
tangle of navy ribbon, the syncopated bongo-
drum thump and thrum of your three hearts
on break between sets and resting silent
on the stage? By what unlikelihood
were you frozen solid in this tightly-wound
pose, like a multi-limbed Hindu goddess
in lotus position, riding the plains by freight
truck to Sakura Square in Denver, where
my mother admired the brawny circumference
of your arms, the snow-white firmness
of your inner flesh, the rubbery erect grip
of your suction cups? And what were the odds
that you’d be packed in dry ice by the ojii-san
behind the counter, tucked into our avocado-
green Igloo ice cooler and driven home
across the state line to Wyoming? You remain
frozen in time in my parents’ freezer—totemic,
statuesque, infinite and apocryphal—even though
you’ve been eaten many times over, one arm
at a time, sliced thin into cross-sectioned slivers
for sushi on birthdays and holidays. As a child,
I used to think the dull muffled thud and clunk
of the furnace firing into life at night was the sound
of your head bumping up against the freezer lid,
the cold grate and clash of meats shifting,
scraping against one another in the wake
of your thrashing tentacles’ lash and whip.
What error in judgment took you from your cozy
niche, your eclectic garden arranged with such
compulsive precision: the slender-necked
and lush-hipped wine bottles, the shiny winking
bits of mirror startling back your placid mild eye,
the pickle jar whose lid you loved to screw
and unscrew—dangling in a tapered arm,
your exquisitely sensitive, ganglia-rimmed
suckers quivering, to check for tasty things
to eat? Did you become snarled in a fisherman’s
net, or clasped tight in the steel embrace
of a lobster trap—caught in the careless
kleptomania of your endless lust for crustacea?
And did your chromatophores pulse first white,
then red, to semaphore the blushing flush
of fear flaming to anger? Were you caped
in a smoky swirl of spewed blackness dispersing
the way sumi-é ink curls away from
the tornado whirl of a horsehair brush
being twirled clean in water? Today the snow
just falls and falls, and I think of you
as the relentless volatile wind lifts the flakes
into blinding, shimmering white veils that spiral
and mist—so cold the fine spray delicately
burns for one moment against the skin,
and frozen feathery etchings are flung up
against the windows like splayed bits
of goosedown. Cars and trucks cough and come
to a halt, my back door freezes shut.
The barometer drops and empty wine bottles
line the kitchen counter like bowling pins.
How odd, I keep thinking to myself
as everything around me creaks and groans
and shivers, then stills to ice and frost.
How odd that it has all come to this.
And then I wish for someone, anyone at all,
to dream of me, if only for a moment,
to unfurl my rigid aching limbs and melt down
all my hearts, taste my salt on their tongue,
let ice transubstantiate to breathing flesh,
and resurrect me back into the living again.