The Poetry of Nicky Beer

OCTOPUS VULGARIS The tank bubbles intermittently, but there is no tide to sway her into grace. Turn, and in your peripherals there’s           a sudden flex, a time-lapse lily blossoming into your blind spot. Trebled, as if by volition, now spread against almost the entirety of the glass, she obscures her habitat and commands you to the entirety of herself, her self-           tossed parachute of cream and coral. But no—she can never know fully the spectacle           of her fullest extension, her underside a mystery only glimpsed in walleyed glance, rather than the awesome totality now riveting you before the tank's illumined peepshow, overshadowing the static girandoles of attendant anemone and starfish.                                                         Blue- blooded, three-hearted hedonist, she arches           into Gehry porticoes against the thick plate                     addled by green neon, plots for the hour when she’ll heave herself out during the night           shift, gorge herself on the neighboring scallop habitat. Admit it—her splay and sprawl           has made you blush. Just looking,                      you think, as if such an enterprise were safe, as if she were not           the pupil-Pandora she is,           who can open a jar if only           you’ll teach her.

VENTOUSE SOUS VERRE                                                Sucker under glass Those empty, aubergine-edged saucers, her best, in sundry sizes,            are precisely tessellated and creepingly uncountable.                  She has laid you a table d’hote of these ghost-courses against the glass,           which is imperceptible without her, heavy-lidded proprietress who is all raised                                                                     hem and no flirt.

GIANT SQUID CAUGHT ON FILM! You spiraled to life in greenblack and white: the same cinematic palette in which we first watched the sex acts of celebrities. We loved you a little less then, having become unforgivably visible. Even your conciliatory gesture of self-mutilation, that orphaned ticker tape arm hooksnagged, helloed and good- byed by the current, could not mollify. We wanted a mouthless God, eyes untouched by light. Whose judgment was not judgment but the pulse of instinct in a cold, dim mind. Drag the camera down. Smash its aperture. We cannot bear to have our depths unmonstered.

SKIN TRADE "…the real appeal of the showgirl lies not in her individuality but in the way she is multiplied and refracted across the stage." And so you are not known for your- self, but by your most convenient, refractive metaphor: an abundance of appendage. It is your gift of chromatic mercuriality that goes generally unnoticed, which is, one supposes, your intention anyway. As the occasion dictates—hunger, panic, slow death—you become whatever is appropriate, a perfect black cocktail dress of predator/prey in your effortlessness. Even while ailing in your convalescent tank at the National Zoo the aptly-named Marcia Frame could observe your skin dissolve into "half ashen and half black, as if some imaginary line were drawn through [your] body," then pale as a Victorian neurasthenic, then a ravenous terra-cotta, all the while assuming "flamboyant postures." Should we take this as a sign of great compassion or great duplicity? Think of the marvelous homilies and clichés that could have been! The un- trustworthy would be as consistent as an octopus’s skin; a lost cause would be like trying to find a frightened octopus; the Dalai Lama could urge us to adopt the empathy of the octopus in our encounters with strangers. But I’m content to cross- reference you with scapegoat, gull, sitting duck, clay pigeon: in midcentury pulpo pulp fiction cover art, you obligingly incarnate whatever terror the age required. For the 1945 summer issue of Planet Stories you were a mechanical threat, incongruously sharp-toothed and louver-jawed as a lamprey, a bloodied and blue arm poised to spank the barely-covered bottom of an alienne in heels with a geisha updo. In 1953’s Adventures Into the Unknown the mistress of the ostentatiously, insidiously red menace attacking the captain of the derelict fleet hag-cackled "HA-HA! Now do you know me for what I AM?" Even this hour you lurk in the news- channel slapdash as the roiling embrace of coastal hurricane fronts, the inky fireclouds shrouding the steel reef of a city skyline, the viral naiad spiraling in the blood stream… It seems this is the most salient of all your gifts: the sheer bonelessness of you, how you collapse and insinuate yourself into our most private crevasses, feeding on whatever schools of blind and blundering alarm the sea change offers. To know what you are now, we must know what we fear first.

PESCADOS DE PESADILLAS                                                Nightmare fish When Dali submerged the young octopus he’d found on the Catalan seashore in acid, it was not                            to watch the violent irradiation of its skin from pearlescence to wounded rose nor the convulsive arabesques of its arms in the corrosive bath, nor even for the etching he made from its corpse so that Medusa might be mantled with spectral, tentacular snakes,                            but that he might earn from his transgression a lifetime of dreams in which many-armed remorse would roost upon his shoulder, lay a chilled, reproachful catenary against his cheek and in the instant before his ears turned to granite he could at last hear the soft, slightly acrid voice pressing him for an answer to its dark, indelible question.

RIMBAUD'S KRAKEN Citizens, awake! These are not the low, mild clouds of your usual daybreaks—behold the slowly-advancing arms of the apocalyptic monster, already filling with a pink, sinister light! The city is a coral reef flaunting electric crustaceans, a lewd feast laid out for him under the heavens. He will fiddle harshly the nude steeple of the church, thump the opera house roof in a savage tom-tom. His music will make the pauper priests and debutantes run wild in the street, shucking moth-eaten cassocks and silk-and-diamond unmentionables to careen off one another like lascivious pinballs. Look out, schoolteachers! He’s come to suck the bones from your bodies, to toss your slumping skins like hobo overcoats into the gutters where you’ll spend your last breaths belching out chalk dust. The savage urchins, those diminutive monsters who set fire to the backs of stray dogs— all at once they’ll shriek in terror to see their fingers turn to sardines in his thundering shadow. The public monuments will swarm with snails, their slime-trails a griffonage of queer divinations. Don’t bother running to the sewers to hide— the pipes have already come alive in their catacombs, ready to strangle. Citizens, it’s all his! Your only chance now is to sprout another quartet of limbs and clear the way as he unfurls down the thoroughfares a hundredfold, while the paving stones squeal like spinsters under the thick, obscene banners of his arms!

RESTORATION PORTRAIT

She’s practically drowning in tippets. The windrowed stoles seize her torso like a startled invertebrate she’d dragged up from the seafloor to nurse. Somewhere beneath the chemise hides a head strangely sucking at her salt. Her face has too many bones. Her skin is a decadence of blue. She has the look of someone born to live under glass, tagged with Latin. Something has been sketched against her elbow to keep her from tilting out of the frame. It is not important whether it is a fishbowl or a tambour. There’s a bit of red in the picture where someone’s pried her stitches open. We might peel her off in layers and find another subject entirely beneath the thick duff of oil and lacquer. That sitter might even be historical, the creature at her neck a proper familiar after all. There may even be scapular or habit enough for us to see the touch of God luminating her like a tasteful maquillage. For now, it is impossible to say if the likeness is good—everyone who could have known her is dead. A chip of white sits in the coffer of her right eye, deliberate as a chess piece. Her feet have been a mystery for centuries.

PRAIRIE OCTOPUS, AWAKE The night's turned everything to junipers shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit, weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut. I forget this isn't my universe sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling most of my life to land here, a lone skirl in the immaculate hush. In my world I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung. Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will do if I don’t keep a close eye on it. Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars' prisms, seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well— I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.

AD HOMINEM The Poet:                   Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine—                   where’s the pink crimp in my side                   where they took you out? The Octopus:                   It must be a dull world, indeed,                   where everything appears                   to be a version or extrapolation                   of you.                   The birds are you.                   The springtime is you.                   Snails, hurricanes, saddles, elevators—                   everything becomes                   you.                   I, with a shift                   of my skin, divest my self                   to become the rock                   that shadows it.                   Think of when                   your reading eyes momentarily drift,                   and in that instant                   you see the maddening swarm of alien ciphers submerged within the text                   gone before you can focus.                   That’s me.                   Or your dozing revelation                   on the subway that you are                   slowly being                   digested. Me again.                   I am the fever dream                   in which you see your loved ones                   as executioners. I am also their axe.                   Friend, while you’re exhausting                   the end of a day                   with your sad approximations,                   I’m a mile deep                   in the earth, vamping                   my most flawless impression                   of the abyss                   to the wild applause of eels.

THE OCTOPUS GAME                                                after Vasko Popa Two people sit side by side And become each other’s arms They are forbidden even to scratch their own itches Must be teachable in adjusting The pressure from their fingernails To rake the strange, neighboring skin One eases sweet floes of mango Between the other's lips While worrying the reed Of a proffered saxophone It’s true that one risks Endless hours Polishing shoes and washing dishes but One may fire a pistol At whomever his partner condemns In total innocence At last while one is nodding into sleep The other beguiles The dreaming arms Into sliding his partner’s Heart out from between his ribs And concealing it in his own chest In retaliation the other will do Exactly the same When the opportunity allows And so on until the players Exchange stomachs heads legs Until both walk away Impenetrably disguised In bodies that are at last Perfectly obedient