The Fickle Selkie
You came in on the wave
you left on,
dripping sleek and strong
your secrets wearied in the foam.
You opened wide
your kelp drift eyes
so I could see
timelessly
the sea you plowed so long
without a harvest
richer than sing-song.
We waltzed the wrecks
on dead men's bones,
and of
the everything we found
we carried
nothing home.
I should have known
you'd leave as quick
as sea fret wrack
without a sound.
You are
nothing to me now---
your joys or griefs,
your warmth that fades
in the windy days
of a landsman's chill,
nothing at all of sea or land
less than the
fine dust that seeps a sand
between lid and eye
to stab each blink,
an almost-nothing soon gone
in the rub of tears.
You are
nothing to me now
nothing,
nothing at all--
no scrimshaw kiss
no oceanic salt-lick--
only a bit of bric-
a-brac decor,
the mounted skull
beside the door
of some strayed herbivore
who met its end in heat and thirst,
bleached and white and empty-eyed,
ant-cleaned of all the tasty worst.
Outside the walls
I cannot hear
the wave that crashes on
your name
circling spray
in wraithlike wreaths
around my lambent chimney tor,
the smoke of cedars
upward taking blind
into nothing
the burn of the soft wet skin
you left behind.
~September, 2015
"Selkies ...are mythological creatures found in Scottish,
Irish, [Icelandic] and Faroese folklore... Selkies are said to live as seals in
the sea but shed their skin to become human on land."
~wikipedia
Image: Näcken (The Water Sprite), 1882 by Ernst Josephson, public domain via wikimedia commons
