Cephalopods can dream—or so my feed declares,
emphatically, and now I’m watching octopuses thread
a maze, pull levers, slip their tanks like small affairs
of no concern, each tentacle a separate head
that mocks the bounds of what we thought was mind: all told,
eight arguments against the crown we’ve kept misread
as singular. In thirty seconds someone holds
a Turing claim aloft: the void is artfully designed,
by who or what is up for grabs—the northern pole
of Saturn is a hexagon, a churning storm that grinds
its nightmares to ammonium—and then from large to scant:
the honeybee, that blind geometer, has always known the kind
of angle gods prefer, born from humming plates of sand
that shiver into six-fold slants and curves of eight
that whales and dolphins somehow understand.
Or so the young Malaysian man declares, not quite
a scientist, or not at all. In fact a fraud,
intoning with a blue sarong from Cleveland Heights—
this bane of Al-Khwarazmi, rescued from the Tigris mud
for one incessant scroll, his corpus wrung from history
to hawk the failing groin and thinning head—
the river running black into the feed.