The Potato Selkie

 

"...I am a man upon the land

I am a silkie on the sea
And when I'm far and far frae land
My home, it is in Sule Skerrie.."

The Silkie Song, Joan Baez

The Potato Selkie

 

 

 

He came frying to earth

on a feather not feather,

a float of an idea soft

as a potato, begging for form.

I put him to age

in a metal-bound cask to see

what he might eventually be;

something playful

and deadly as vodka,

or a poor-mind's pierogi

 to be gnoshed then spat

like sawdust-wurst. I sunk the cask

beneath a wave (New Wave, they say) 

and soon saw a man upon dry land

who dreamed of a selkie on the sea,

a million miles from Sule Skerrie

With a slick-metal sheen, he

sang to me in a lilt and croon

like potato mash, shapeshifting

 animus to idiot maximus.

In his strangle, only heat and dead air

still and dry, a trembling reflection

a shimmer of no-light, a clockwork cry

as he grabbed for my pen

with his fish-breath mouth,

jumped in the sea

and drowned

again.

 

 

June 2023

posted for Poetry Slam at The Singularity Corral

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top Image: The Hand, ©Salvador Dali 1930   Fair Use

Ai generated image sadly failing to be a selkie of any kind but at least forlorn about it.

Musical Interlude ~ Silkie

This song has moved into my head this week after reading a poem over at Oran's Well, called The Selkie Bride, by Brendan. His piece would be an excellent thing to read in conjunction to this tale of a sea-demon lover and an 'earthly nurse' who bears his child, rendered  by a young Joan Baez. The song was collected from Orkney by the American folk music scholar, Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century (Child ballad number 113.)

The full title is The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, Sule Skerry being a remote escarpment off the north coast of Scotland in the Orkneys.