Cephalopod Senescence
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
“It is a spring, moonless night in the small town, . . . the cobbled streets silent . . . limping invisible down to the . . . crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. […] Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers . . . see the . . . the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, . . . dished up by the hidden sea.”
–Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas’s town, New Quay, and the Octopuses at the Quay in Wales*
Their slick pocked tentacles
suck their way up the quay
miniature Medusas
in the crowblack moonless night
Rose blistered stippled legs
waddle up stones wander
from the shore like fat old ladies
in the crowblack moonless night
Ballooning bodies heave
in and out out and in
in death throes with each breath
in the crowblack moonless night
The fishermen are aghast
What plague has crawled out of the sea
in the moonless night they ask?
Did creatures lose their way
in atmospheric upheavals, storm surges,
in polluted seas—blue and purple pellets
straws and plastic bits glistening like charms?
How did man-of-war, giant barreled jellyfish,
lose their bearings? Pulled in by the tides
by the relentless rush of waves
Will the dolphins, too, swimming in their midst be gone?
All dished up by stinking death?
Will we all become nothing more than sprats shells
and fish bones in the crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea
*“NEW QUAY, West Wales — The poet Dylan Thomas called this the ‘cliff-edge town at the far end of Wales,’ but lately it has become better known as the place where the octopuses crawled out of the sea.”
-Rod Nordland, “Cliff-Edge Town Visited by Poets, Dolphins—and Octopuses,”
New Quay Journal, November 16, 2017