It's good to see you again, [? Andy ?]..
We go way back.
I think some of these poems I wrote
while I was in Tuscaloosa.
This is from my second book.
And I haven't looked at them for a while.
Page 49, please.
Part of being a writer is sometimes
you challenge yourself to get things into a poem.
You say I want to get this poem, I want to get this thing.
And I had been listening to a lot of Otis Redding at the time
that I was writing this.
And this was back, also, when Napster
was like-- the first Napster, where you just could steal,
like, 9 million songs.
And at the University of Alabama,
we had this T3 internet connection
where you could just download thousands of songs in an hour.
And so I was just stealing with abandon.
And so I had recently been listening
to a lot of Otis Redding.
And he had this song that I was into called
"These Arms of Mine."
And I decided to use that title for this poem.
And it's an animal poem.
"These Arms of Mine."
"Let's promise to never love like the octopus, floating
in darkness in jellied ink, its beak the only hardness
it knows.
And though I can't imagine how it helps matters,
in the eight-arm midst of its mating,
a limb will often fall away from the body,
by ecstasy amputated to the silt. All morning,
I have failed to find why, though no one
fails to mention that death soon follows all this armlessness.
It's fascinating, but a mess.
Imagine if each time we kiss, my ear
fell off, if the morning was not so
much for brushing the fog of the night
from the mouth but reassembly.
You might go out into the day with my bad ankle.
I'd never hear the end of it.
What would there be to talk about
except that we were falling apart and too soon,
and how dull it had all become, this entropy, the shedding,
this habit of the cephalopod that no one can explain?
Maybe it's like the threatened sea
cucumber everting its guts to leave less to hunger's hunger.
Maybe eight arms is one arm too many to bear
in the alien instant of that inscrutable love.
That, I would understand.
That, I could recognize in the mirror of my skin,
in yours, there in the crushing depth of the night.
There we'd find each other like exotic gods,
our hands manifold, our fingers infinite-- well, almost.
Soon, the subtraction, the severing, the silence
like a wave."
And comes from one of those little factoids you read.
I had read one time where in octopi mating,
one of the-- it's so violent that one of the members
will often lose an arm.
And I found that was just fascinating.
But no one would ever-- and so I was looking it up.
And there was really never any explanation for it.
And I was getting really frustrated
because they were all just fascinating.
They were all just really into actually
that the octopus would usually die following it.
And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're probably going to die if you
cut your arm off underwater.
But I want to know how it happens.
But I never found out.
Maybe it doesn't matter.