Asterozoa

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