Baseball Game, with Octopus

I want the dusty afternoon sun to sneak up
on top of me through the living room shutters
while I loll on my couch listening to Buck Martinez
lament the modern catcher’s squat and then the thwock
of a hardball hitting the leather pocket—
that’s how I know it’s all about to begin.
But there’s a week until the new baseball season,
and all I can think about is the ocean.

Last night I watched this beautiful documentary
about octopi, where the blue of the water
looked more real than blue should ever look,
and then into the shot walks this octopus on two tentacles,
the other six bunched into herself like a petticoat
she needs to keep clean. And then she stops,
stares right at the camera and squats—
like a bulldog catcher and I’m the pitcher
and we have a game to play.

And I already know the point of it all—
I don’t need the narrator to tell me how smart
she is, how just-like-us it all is, how human
it all is—and maybe that’s true, maybe the octopus
is signalling for a slow curve right over the plate.

But then I look past her and I see that blue
again, so deep and so dark you’d think
the evening sky itself had drowned.
And I press pause so it’s just me and the blue
and the squatting octopus, waiting for something
to happen, as if the happening is the point,
as if nothing makes sense without the happening—

There are two ends to this story: in one version,
I un-pause the tv and everything moves again—
the octopus inks away, the camera angle shifts,
the narrator finds a new object of fascination,
and the ocean becomes temporary.

In the other version, I never press play,
the octopus is still waiting for the pitch,
and the blue abides beyond my seeing—
There I am, a couch-frozen, tableau vivant
absorbed into the tentacular pitch of suburban night
where nothing ever moves again
and the whole goddamn world is saved.