Brenda Shaughnessy - The Octopus Museum: Poems
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Informed by Brenda Shaughnessys craft as a poet and her worst fears as a mother, the poems inThe Octopus Museumblaze forth from her pen: in these pages, we see that what was once a generalized fear for our children (car accidents, falling from a tree) is now hyper-reasonable, specific, and multiple: school shootings, nuclear attack, loss of health care, a polluted planet. As Shaughnessy conjures our potential future, she movingly (and often with humor) envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans. These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves, and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.
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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 PS 3569. H 353 (ebook) | LCC PS 3569. H 353 A 6 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.54 DC 23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036768
Ebook ISBN9780525655664
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
TO THE OM EXHIBITS
Identity & Community (There Is No I in Sea)
I dont want to be surrounded by people. Or even one person. But I dont 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.
Im 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 powers source?
Theres no privacy outside. Weve invaded it.
There is no life outside empire. All paradise is performance for people who pay.
Perhaps Im an invader and feel I havent paid.
What a waste, to have lost everything in mind.
Watching three mom-like women try to go in, Im greenI want to join them.
But they are not my women. I join them, apologizing.
They splash away from metheyre their pod. People are alien.
Im 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. Im new with envy.
Beauty washing over itself. No reflection. No claim. Nothing to see.
If theres anything bluer than the ocean its its greenness. Its its turquoise blood, mixing me.
I was a woman alone in the sea.
Dont tell anybody, I tell myself.
Dont try to remember this. Dont document it.
Remember: write down to not-document it.
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 extinctionpure 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.
Wed 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 wed have to come, together; and so I tried to make you come; you said it was our last time so youd remember it.
You cried out, then cried and I cried and I hardened against you, then softened, then wished we could go back, wanted to love you like before, twisted myself like nobodys pile of wires.
Did you try to make me come, and I couldnt, wouldnt? Or did I give you that and let you let me go?
And there will be no other way to be, once this ways 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 Novembers over never another. Each day nothing like the last except that its the last and thats new, too.
Each moment broken glasses, a covered mirror, foxed. The waste stays in place. The rest disappears. The unrest, too.
Theres no way to follow my own mind. My own mind is not leading. Im unleaded. Im gasoline.
Im everything in between this flame and that attracted wind. I forgot my glasseshow will we drink?
Seeing isnt believing if I believe I see better with something I can so easily forget.
And what if I cant forget? I forgot the heft and squirm of my own baby in my arms, in my own womb.
Ill forget anything and call it an accident, match to fuel and breathing it all in as if Im 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. Ive never seen my womb but my doctor has. I never saw that doctor again.
Gift Planet
My six-year-old said, I dont know time. She already knows its 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 cant wait to be home.
All travelings a way to imagine having a home to leave or return to.
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