The Octopus Museum Read online

  ALSO BY BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY

  So Much Synth

  Our Andromeda

  Human Dark with Sugar

  Interior with Sudden Joy

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Brenda Shaughnessy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Shaughnessy, Brenda, 1970– author.

  Title: The octopus museum : poems / Brenda Shaughnessy.

  Description: New York : Knopf, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018036768 (print) | LCCN 2018038674 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525655657 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525655664 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.H353 (ebook) | LCC PS3569.H353 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.54—DC23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018036768

  Ebook ISBN 9780525655664

  Cover photograph by Kim Keever

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v5.4

  ep

  For Simone

  If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  When you lie dead, no one will remember you

  For you have no share in the Muses’ roses.

  —SAPPHO, Fragment 33

  VISITOR'S GUIDE

  TO THE OM EXHIBITS

  The OM has five exhibition spaces, with another three currently under construction.

  Cover

  Also by Brenda Shaughnessy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Identity & Community (There Is No "I" in "Sea")

  GALLERY OF A DREAMING SPECIES

  No Traveler Returns

  Gift Planet

  Wellness Rituals

  There Was No Before (Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles)

  SPECIAL COLLECTION: "AS THEY WERE"

  The Home Team

  Irreversible Change

  Dream of Brown

  I Want the World

  Evening Prayer for the Humans

  The Dessert I Didn't Have

  “TO SERVE MAN": RITUALS OF THE LATE ANTHROPOCENE COLONY

  Bakamonotako

  G-Bread

  The Idea of Others

  Sel de la Terre, Sel de Mer

  Home School

  Notes on an Old Holiday

  Map of Itself

  FOUND OBJECTS/LOST SUBJECTS: A RETROSPECTIVE

  Thinking Lessons

  Our Beloved Infinite Crapulence

  Letters from the Elders

  New Time Change

  Letter from an Elder

  Nest

  Blueberries for Cal

  PERMANENT COLLECTION: ARCHIVE OF PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS

  Are Women People?

  Honeymoon

  Our Zero Waiver

  Our Family on the Run

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  A Note About the Author

  Identity & Community (There Is No “I” in “Sea”)

  I don’t want to be surrounded by people. Or even one person. But I don’t want to always be alone.

  The answer is to become my own pet, hungry for plenty in a plentiful place.

  There is no true solitude, only only.

  At seaside, I have that familiar sense of being left out, too far to glean the secret: how go in?

  What an inhuman surface the sea has, always open.

  I’m too afraid to go in. I give no yes.

  Full of shame, but refuse to litter ever. I pick myself up.

  Wind has power. Sun has power. What is power’s source?

  There’s no privacy outside. We’ve invaded it.

  There is no life outside empire. All paradise is performance for people who pay.

  Perhaps I’m an invader and feel I haven’t paid.

  What a waste, to have lost everything in mind.

  Watching three mom-like women try to go in, I’m green—I want to join them.

  But they are not my women. I join them, apologizing.

  They splash away from me—they’re their pod. People are alien.

  I’m an unknown story, erasing myself with seawater.

  There goes my honey and fog, my shoulders and legs.

  What could be queerer than this queer tug-lust for what already is, who already am, but other of it?

  Happens? That kind of desire anymore?

  Oh I am that queer thing pulling and greener than the blue sea. I’m new with envy.

  Beauty washing over itself. No reflection. No claim. Nothing to see.

  If there’s anything bluer than the ocean it’s its greenness. It’s its turquoise blood, mixing me.

  I was a woman alone in the sea.

  Don’t tell anybody, I tell myself.

  Don’t try to remember this. Don’t document it.

  Remember: write down to not-document it.

  GALLERY OF A DREAMING SPECIES

  No Traveler Returns

  I was like you once, a sealed plastic bag of water filters floating on the sea.

  I thought my numbers proved my time and space on earth.

  I thought having children was a way of creating more love.

  I thought thoughts I was ashamed to speak in case they were what everyone already thought or in case they were unthinkable thoughts nobody would dare think much less say which would blow up the world everyone else had to live in if I said them.

  I muddled that distinction to extinction—pure silence not a piece of peace and a breathlessness not of wonder but blackthroat, choking on backwash.

  Once a wild tentacled screaming creature every inch a kissed lip of a beloved place, a true and relentless mind, all heart if heart is a dumb hope of reusable pump.

  What was it you said that made me think I was like you once?

  Remember the last terrifying moments? You clenched up and wanted me to be completely open.

  We’d broken up (remember such terms? Such luxury? We thought breaking up a kind of preservation.) and to cut off circulation decided to sever at the place where our hair had grown together.

  An axe, a pair of kitchen scissors. That rusty axe fully fatigued and scissors which cut raw chicken bacteria into everything it touched.

  Nothing did the trick. To come apart we’d have to come, together; and so I tried to make you come; you said it was our last time so you’d remember it.

  You cried out, then cried and I cried and I hardened against you, then softened, then wi
shed we could go back, wanted to love you like before, twisted myself like nobody’s pile of wires.

  Did you try to make me come, and I couldn’t, wouldn’t? Or did I give you that and let you let me go?

  ————

  And there will be no other way to be, once this way’s gone. The last song on earth, the last jellybean. Last because nobody wanted it, or everybody sang it, till the end.

  Once this day in November’s over never another. Each day nothing like the last except that it’s the last and that’s new, too.

  Each moment broken glasses, a covered mirror, foxed. The waste stays in place. The rest disappears. The unrest, too.

  There’s no way to follow my own mind. My own mind is not leading. I’m unleaded. I’m gasoline.

  I’m everything in between this flame and that attracted wind. I forgot my glasses—how will we drink?

  Seeing isn’t believing if I believe I see better with something I can so easily forget.

  And what if I can’t forget? I forgot the heft and squirm of my own baby in my arms, in my own womb.

  I’ll forget anything and call it an accident, match to fuel and breathing it all in as if I’m living normally from day to re-registered day.

  Why is it, if I can only remember what I myself experienced, that I can also forget what I experienced? Who records the records and collects the recollections?

  I had that baby in my womb for thirty-nine weeks, for three quarters of a year, a full calendar minus summer. An unforgettable summer, each day fucking endless.

  Oh I know all the numbers; everything adds up. I’ve never seen my womb but my doctor has. I never saw that doctor again.

  Gift Planet

  My six-year-old said, “I don’t know time.” She already knows it’s unknowable. Let it be always a stranger she walks wide around.

  I fantasize about outer space as if I have some relation to it besides being an animal in its zoo. No visitors. No matter how far I travel on earth I wind up sitting in rooms.

  Wind up running all over towns and streets the same. Then get hungry as anywhere, again. Going anyplace, I think: I never want to go home and I can’t wait to be home.

  All traveling’s a way to imagine having a home to leave or return to.

  The shame of never leaving home. The anguish of no home. Changing housekeys on the unchanged ring. The ring is the home, the thing inside trees.

  Claiming a tree “mine.”

  Car feels like a pod, an exoskeleton, a place inside me. Car short for “carapace.”

  I blame the weather, blame myself if the weather is “nice.” Tell myself the weather ruined my plans, though it’s me ruined the weather’s.

  Plan: like plane like plain like pain/pane. Like planet. Plan acting like an overlay on everything most elemental. Trying to make everything go according to it—feelings, food, flight, ordinariness, the very earth.

  Stop already. Stop as if you can. As if you can breathe back in your own baby, your two, your three. Breathe out all the ones you never had. Breathe in one two three. Breathe out all the others.

  I don’t want to be cremated. I want to be part of earth. Space may be my original home but I only remember here.

  I cling to this life. I’ve taped myself to it like a card on a gift. Happy birthday! Many happy returns and hope it’s lots of fun! We miss you! Love, Me.

  A gift is always an exchange of energy. Like water boiling, like photosynthesis. Inside the box is a water pitcher and a picture of us together as we were when the photo was taken.

  Now it’s given. It’s only a copy, but the original was a moment and was burned up, caloric.

  Simone says before bed, “I’m imagining a strawberry automatically drawn. I dream so much when I’m awake.”

  When I learned to tell time I told it. I told it so; I stopped listening to what it tried to tell me: You’re already losing everything as you go and go and go.

  Wellness Rituals

  You never understood me until you watched me wash the inside of the well, with clean wellwater and invisible soap which dissolves the dirt and then clumps up and floats to the surface, suddenly iridescent.

  I net up the greening lumps, skimming. I leave the net out to dry. Within hours the lumps are coagulated and bacterial, dirty heads striated with living question marks, leech-pieces, worm eyes, segments of fertile sediment.

  Enough bio-material to assemble themselves into flying animals, little glowing spitballs. They waver off into their new lives. I made them surely as I made my daughter: without knowing how.

  I washed down the sides with seasponge, as far as my arms could go then lowered myself in the bucket. Down there I used my feet. Scrubbed the stones and cracks of moss and slime and what else? Dead water. New algae. Legs of things.

  I held my breath against the earth perfume in case it was infected, and spread my legs to straddle the diameter, my toes clenched on wet grit. My own holes amphibian as ever. Where does my water come from? From myself you know.

  I am a self-cleaning animal and my children were born glistening under all the soft trees leaving, breathing. You understand me now; the well was always clean. I clean it anyhow. It is no cleaner now than it was but I am.

  There Was No Before (Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles)

  Before health insurance there was health, a pre-existing condition before the weird paper-cut-on-the-neck had you eventually getting around in a wheelbarrow pulled by a gentle mule named Sinister. Sure it’s metaphoric. Also true.

  When I say you, I mean me. Who else can I talk to? Before you were born, the world got along hopelessly without you, lonely without knowing why. The sharp edges of birdsong scraped across the sky gay with fever, no way to bring it down.

  On the ground, houses were called homes and homes were called living spaces and they dotted the sick countryside—those near-dead spaces. Dead spaces were called cemeteries back then, too. Dead air was what the interred watched on TV.

  Everything was a show, which must go on and on, continuing in sleep rehearsal space. In the morning our dreams were still a mess, nobody knew the blocking, gels melted onto the hot lights, and we could hardly sit through the thing.

  In waking life we said our lines or broke character or looked directly at the lens, and were entertained. We binge-watched ourselves till we believed daybreak was a rerun and the stars a quiet new kind of crime drama that had inaudible singing in it.

  ————

  My child would complain when I didn’t let her stay the second half of the pre-school day. “I want to be part of the Lunch Bunch!” though I’d make her her favorite at home. Of course the school had to make it sound fun for kids to be left all day.

  I couldn’t afford all-day pre-school. Soon nobody could afford it. Before and after-Before, too. Children have always had to stuff their whole selves into the corners pinning their grown-ups. I thought I’d miss her too much anyway, and indeed I do.

  I know nothing about her job these days. Surely she’s got a lunch bunch at the staff caf with her break mates. A corner of her own with friends before her second shift. She has so little time outside of work.

  Before Sinister came into the family you rolled yourself down, saying It’s all downhill from here. Which was the same as saying It’s all uphill. You’d pick up friends, neighbors, exes, along the way and give them rides. You all went downhill fast.

  Black children were killed in broad daylight, in parks and streets and in houses and churches and cars. Especially in cars. The law said it wasn’t allowed, but it was expressly allowed, encouraged, and unpunished. The law said this was the law, each time a person chose to do it. These were not accidents.

  This was Before, and we’re almost certain it is the same now as Before, only now we d
on’t know the laws. They keep it overtly secret now, as they think we’ll think there was no Before. It’s not just black children anymore, it’s everyone.

  ————

  We didn’t all used to have shells. Our skin was soft and easily cut, even a sheet of paper could sever your nerves, become infected, and leave you wheelbarrow-bound. It didn’t even matter what was written on the paper.

  We could afford our naked flesh, survival-wise, less so if the outer layer of your flesh was dark or part-dark. And there were commonly awful injuries to the softest flesh especially of women and kids where men turned their flesh to weapons.

  These were not accidents. These injuries altered the bodies and minds of the women and kids and changed the flesh and spirit of the as-yet-uninjured, too. The threat of flesh harming flesh went beyond flesh.

  Because it was the mind of a person that put the harm in motion. A person chose to do it. Women hid in basements, trying to imagine the mind of a man bent on harm. Kids thought they had to do whatever grown-ups told them.

  They thought that a man who had a puppy was always nice. Women swaggered in groups downtown and were picked off one by one. Women thought they were the only one every time it happened. Kids stopped remembering whole years.

  ————

  Long before people existed, mollusks were soft plasmic shapes for whom, if you mentioned shells they’d say Whatever you’re talking about is completely alien to me and I am not interested as if you were trying to sell them, simple Ediacaran bilaterals, a bridge.