The Kiss of Asterion
“As Thurston Lacalli from the University of Victoria in Canada put it […] the sea star is like a ‘disembodied head
walking about the sea floor on its lips.’”
—“How many arms do starfish have? If you said ‘five,’ you’re wrong,” MSN.com
I should have been a pair of luscious lips
sneering forward under salty seas,
osculating through the riptide’s rips
or spitting free, and flapping where they please.
The act of walking then would be a prayer,
a moving murmur, ba-ba-ba-ba; thence
to tell by taste each sailed-through saline layer
and map the seas by this most subtle sense,
tasting every grain of whorl-stirred sand
beneath my face, each mote of ocean matter.
An orphan head, not sliced or severed, and
not kissed by Salome upon a platter,
but whole, in part—such little weight to press
the kiss-soft floor, my furrow like a scar.
The end of evolution: to regress
into a lightless mind, become a star.