As they watched the patterns flicker and pool on the octopus’s skin, Ha began to make out repetitions. Here and there, she caught a symbol that repeated within the sequence. And there was a rhythm as well—slight pauses in the cycle, accelerations and slowings, and what might even be larger, multi-symbol repetitions. Motifs? It was like watching a complex waveform, the way symbols shrank and grew across the octopus’s mantle, suggesting an analogy to vocal volume. The way they slowed and lingered at times. Stresses and articulations, like the inflection of a voice at a critical moment. Yet all fluid, one design resolving into another in a metamorphosis that sometimes called to mind linkage, and at other moments a sharp separation between figurings. Paragraphs? Stanzas?

It went on, and on. This was not a conversation. What was it? A song? A lesson? A poem?

Yes. A poem. Or a song, drawn on this flesh in the sea. There were movements within it, cyclings of sequence, those multi-symbol repetitions: moments that, as she watched, she began to lose herself in. The meter-flow of poem, ever-shifting but bound together with rhythms within rhythms. Contrapuntal structures of narrated dialogues, flow and stop of enjambment and line, longer pauses between stanzas.

Now she shifted her attention not to the shapes, but to the pale moments between them, when the figuration ceased for a beat. There. The pulse of pauses. Yes. She tapped her foot. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap.

Meter. It was meter.

A line from a poem wound its way through her as she watched. A line, and then an entire sequence, stanzas rushing up again from the memorizations of university. A trace of heartbreak, borne back now in the variegations and pale pauses that played across the surface of this singer in the sea, like driftwood washed onshore by a storm:

Now moons decline and rise,

Dead metaphors that looked alive.

And you about to die

Out past the water-clock of tides

Naming and renaming your desires.

You rode in wind

And scarred the cheek

Like the edge of an autumn leaf.

I put you in your hollow ship

With wine and bread to drift

The wine-dark sea.

You put me

In my hollow ship.

A memorized part of Patricia Alameda’s poem “Kalypso.” Now come again to her, with all the feeling of heartbreak that had accompanied it.

Ha was weeping. Ancient, this shape-song. In it, rhythm of tide, of moon-ripple played out on night water. Of buoy-clang near the beach and shore of man. Of crab-scuttle and claw-clack. Of fish-dart and propeller-chug. Of whale-song in the wave. Rhythm of the struggle in the jaw of the shark, the loss of limb and spray of ink as the hero battles back against death. Rhythm of shapes taken and disposed of between clumps of cover, stalking prey.