While Jay and I were boating in Sea of Cortez we spent some time in Santa Rosalia, a town whose main industry is squid fishing. These were not your little guys like you would get if you ordered fried Calamari. These were extremely dangerous ten armed torpedoes called Humboldt Squid, whose tentacles were lined with suckers around each of which was a row of claws. They would rip the flesh right off your arm if they grabbed you.

Ricardo, the dock master, had been a squider and offered to take us out to show us the method of catching them. Pulling them in by hand on a 300lb line tipped with a lure or puppet, we ended up with six of the 4 to 6 foot long creatures on the deck. They vibrated emotional color and the huge black eye seemed to seemed to suck you into the recesses of another world in which you were an interloper.

The emotions I felt stuck with me and this poem is the result.

The Witness

by Daniel Noll

I stood as a witness

As the veil was torn

As the lure descended

Through azure transparent

Scarcely seen

Dancing blue-green

Obscene one-eyed seducer

Unblinking, unseeing, unseen

Searching for a partner

In light fractured black

Embraced times ten

The dance, in earnest, began

Ricardo and Squid

Thick line connected

Fate selected

Two arms against ten

I stood as a witness floating

On the ceiling

Of that salty world

A beholder intent on consumption

Of the reluctant partner

Scarcely seen

Rising dancing defiant

Through shadowed blue-green

Denying this bright realm

In watery surges

Tinting friendly aqua

Hostile black

Breaking water, boneless rage

Connected by line taut

Liquidly defying

Bone- stiffened foot- planted need

Geyser driven defiant at last

Through the silky veil pulled

Into this weightier thin liquid,

This ten-armed torpedo

My eyes listened to

Anger quivering in pulses electric

Glistening encrypted emotion

Color coded and slickly written

I stood as a witness

To this drowning inverted

Death wandering rust and black

Across this slack topoedo

My too curious finger pursues the bulging eye

To explore its slickness

It looks back! -undead

And I am seen, exposed, found out

Black-eyed reproached

No longer mere witness, anonymous

Despoiler of multiples

I am complicit destroyer of this one

I am unhooded

And life recedes deep into the pit

Of that great ball

And I follow till I am lost inside

It and my own hazy thoughts

Then I did as men are prone to do

When stirred to impractical feelings,

I bound my conflict in logic

I turned to other things.