NEWLY found specimen, giant squid, eyes the size of dinner-plates.
PUPILs, slits in light, plates in the deep, always seem to watch you,
UTTER fascination, thrill for the museum-goers. What if it were alive?
BRINE? If I were in there with it? It would see me . . . it’d be the last thing I ever see.
Note: this one is a counter-factual allusion to China Miéville’s Kraken, in which the specimen no longer has its eyes:
Its eyes would have been twenty-three or twenty-four centimetres across,” Billy would say. People would measure with their fingers, and children opened their own eyes mimicry-wide. “Yeah, like plates. Like dinner plates.” He said it every time, every time thinking of Hans Christian Andersen’s dog. “But it’s very hard to keep eyes fresh, so they’re gone. We injected it with the same stuff that’s in the tank to stop it rotting from the inside. “It was alive when it was caught.”
Kraken, China Miéville, p8