10
I am your woman on the edge of the sea, mammalian and amphibian.
My eyes are explorations of the spheres, in ways that are not human.
I do not speak your language, but through my green-eyed smooth sway
and through the sudden slip of my pale skin and the throw of my tail.
I do not speak your language, for these oceans are my one true voice
and the shoreline will impart its knowledge, only when you ask of it.
When you return in fifty years time, I will be silently sunning myself
beneath rugged cliffs, or by the sea swallow's nest. I will be alone,
on the edge of maturation, for the lives of the mermaidens are long.
These sails have become my flowing hair and all my long journeying,
was the prow of a haunted ship, that you had so swiftly abandoned.
Do not seek to find a way in, to what does not come upon you naturally.
All will endure what is meant to endure, these transformative processes.
Our reunion is more like seaweed adrift, the ocean sailing into a shell,
a shell sounding into the wind, the light touch of the surfaces, unstable,
irresistible, distractions, tides flowing and ebbing, lips of salt crystals,
slow magnetic gaze, the sighing, shifting sand, particles, finely attuned.
