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 1893—
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?
Orion‘s Summer 2022 issue is generously sponsored by NRDC.
Maria Popova is a reader and a writer, and writes about what she reads on The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress’s permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the author of Figuring, coeditor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and the creator and host of The Universe in Verse.