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    Octopus
    Octopus
    Octopus
    Ebook62 pages23 minutes

    Octopus

    By Patrick Warner

    ()

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    About this ebook

    As apt to channel the confessionalism of Anne Sexton as the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature poetry of Ted Hughes, Patrick Warner’s voice ranges freely from the colloquial to the baroque. Over the past fifteen years, by harboring and honoring such fraught tensions. In Octopus we have him at his best.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBiblioasis
    Release dateOct 18, 2016
    ISBN9781771961325
    Octopus
    Author

    Patrick Warner

    PATRICK WARNER was born and raised in Claremorris, Co. Mayo, Ireland. He moved to Newfoundland in 1980 in search of better weather and economic prosperity. Bitterly disappointed on both counts, he turned to writing, penning three critically acclaimed poetry collections and a novel, double talk. One Hit Wonders is his second fiction offering. Patrick currently lives in downtown St. John’s with his wife, Rochelle, and two daughters, Annie and Greta.

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      Book preview

      Octopus - Patrick Warner

      OCTOPUS

      Just through the door, I gander due west

      until arrested by an on-the-go girl, in hairband,

      sucking a dumbtit, her freckles all sparkles,

      holding before my face her slender hand,

      its fingers showing signs of hyperextension

      (the slightest pressure would bend

      them straight back to her wrist). Her tiny palm

      is divided in four by a cross,

      each quadrant bearing a postage stamp,

      each embossed with a propelling octopus.

      To make you swim where few have swum,

      she says, a life in ten hours, more or less.

      I dab one on the snail-mail of my tongue.

      I turn to pay her, but find she has gone,

      a wisp inhaled into the club’s cavernous lung.

      Nothing then, no tingle, nothing until a line

      appears—a zigzag of joins through the parquet

      floor. I follow, funamble, one step at a time,

      between dancers, until my muscles ache,

      until suddenly comes a flare of lantern light,

      the click of a key in a lock, then the creak

      of a barn door letting animals in for the night.

      I enter, and there in the doorless first stall

      is a plough horse, a grey-dappled white.

      His conker eyes have a calming effect.

      He holds before my face two lacquered hooves

      that he snaps together like halves of a book,

      like a prize-fighter tapping black Everlast gloves.

      All this is a ceremony, preamble

      to his presentation—a gesture of love—

      of a pearl-white harness. I fall

      for it immediately, for its Doris Day fifties’ hair,

      for it being the corbelled arch a fully

      loaded camel would struggle to pass under.

      An hour, ten hours or a year has elapsed.

      I find myself standing before a mirror:

      that octopus vulgaris

      has injected its lamp-black into my eyeball,

      dilating my pupil out into the iris,

      like an idea that’s inflamed the public will,

      breeding a strongman, a movement, an empire,

      leaving all but a few wondering what the hell

      has transpired. SOS’s wired in from everywhere,

      again I am with the

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