Muscular mantle of octopus scarlet and
draped over mons,
affixed to the swell of a vulva
as graceful in contour as liquid contracting
its surface to generate tension,
the quarter-moon irises,
set in protuberant globular eyes,
glaring and pinched by a menacing furrow
through bramble of cunt-hair,
inscrutable, watchful, the pearl diver’s thighs
pale and spread wide in pleasure,
surrender, suckered tentacles rake the tremulous
lower belly
where, deep within, the soft,
formless projecting mouth of the cephalopod projects
a hard, chitinous nutcracking beak
up the vagina’s canal
to nip gently the fleshy bulb of her cervix,
and settle as steady as calipers over a star-burst crease
like the tied-off end of a sausage casing.
The fine-grained, mineral-studded ribbon of radula
lashes the narrow incision
that leads to her womb, a strait innervated,
imprinted by nature and nurture, the mollusk’s abrasive appendage
sawing away like a lockpick through tumblers.
The pearl diver’s heels dug in and squeezing the slippery, billowy octopus head
like a hot air balloon that’s deflating
and drawn up like liquid with every contraction, the animal
giving itself over in service to lust,
decentralized CNS, neurologically-coded flesh
conducted by fluid mechanics, autonomous wicking engaged
by prehensile intelligence,
the flaps of her floodgates exhale,
open to squirt her ejaculate. Seeing his father
rewarded with sprays from her geyser,
a hot, seafloor eruption, the octopus nibbling
and plucking her ear like a string on a lyre with his beak
girdles a tentacle
tightly around a cylindrical nipple,
the halo of aureole drawn up, absorbed as a knob
of creased, puckered flesh.
The pearl diver betrays her husband
in dream or fantasy, aroused by her own defilement,
at the mercy of beasts without pity:
to shiver with lust where she should recoil in terror and disgust.