Selchie (For John) Poem by Jacqui Thewless

I’m looking at the journey
we might have made at sea.

When we were young, I dreamed
we slid into the waters
like mad lemmings
from impossible cliffs,
breaching the deeps
with mouths open
and still singing.

A pair of pneumatic Icarus-wings
pulled us down
far under our airy element.
Some drowned
but after all,
you have grown shells.

The ocean passed through us
as we breathed water
with our own initiated lungs.

And me?
I am half human soul;
I write
small necklaces from cultivated pearls.
Your voice
reminds me of the painful grain of grit:
there are echoes in it from fathoms deep
beds under grumbling waves.

I love you has, of course
now been forgotten -
like your limbs
once used to land -

come into my arms is
an impossible plea,
make love with me’s a mute
refusal of crustacean
pain and nothing
makes you mumble but
the memories of Catholic songs.

And me, the born-again shape-shifter? -
I was fisher-
wife and half a human soul:
I’ve thrown a frock of oysters back into the sea.
In this boat,
I’d sail with you in my lap;
your shells might split
under the sun;
I might
wile distances away between us
with the stories that I’d tell
on my own rosary of pearls?

I close my seal eyes, sick of seeing.

Ladies
and gentlemen, roll up! Roll up!
You are about to see
how this girl flips
herself with one strong leap
onto the solid Rock of Ages;
lets the boat go down
with this sealskin vestment still dripping
yet

look how she keens
for that poor one
milky-white pearl,
lost in an oysterman,
drowned
in a moment.