Octopus Blues

There,
at the bottom of being,
where the water that makes
this planet a world
   is the color of spacetime

the octopus —

with her body-shaped mind
and her eight-arm embrace
    of alien realities,
with her colorblind vision
    sightful of polarized light
and her perpetually awestruck
    lidless eye —

can see

shades of blue we cannot conceive.

Call it god
    if you must
lean on the homely
to fathom the holiness
    of the fathomless whole.

    And meanwhile,
up here,
    we swim amid particles
we cannot perceive
    folded into dimensions
we cannot imagine

to tell stories about
    what is real and
    what is possible,
and what it means to be.

A blink of time ago
we thought the octopus
    impossible,
we thought this blue world
    lifeless
        below three hundred fathoms
until in 1898 —
    an epoch after Bach
    scribbled in the margin
        of a composition
            “Everything that is possible is real” —
we plunged our prosthetic eye
    deep into the blue
and found a universe of life.

There,
the octopus,
    godless and possible,
lives.

Are any of her three hearts breaking
        for us
and our impossible blues?