Asterozoa

by Ben Corvo

That lovely name, “brittle star,” although memories
are all of the ordinary, fleshy kind, in various
pastel shades, piled all one on top of the other
in cold-water tidepools, or stranded, solitary,
on beaches, perhaps not even alive any more,
but retaining some sense of the musculature
radiating out to limb-tips from an all-purpose
orifice, an entire body organized
around grasping things, hard, to that aperture,
again and again, as the watery ceiling wavers
and here are two pairs of ankles, a son, a mother,
picking their way along the thin fringe of shore,
stirring up entire sand-galaxies, their slow turn around
something black, impossibly dense, beyond words.

from Clade Song