The Selkie

SOUL OF MY SOUL

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

... Lord it’s been
almost 20
years since those
nights when
the knot of fire
raged between
us & still my
pen gallops ahead
heedless of
the strain urgently
trying to write
the words down
as they fly:
Nothing approximates
those few moments
of arrival and
erasure in the
hot alembic of
perfect
chemistry: Kay
surely was one
of the most
seamless unions
I have ever
known: At
least for one
two maybe
three nights:
But I know
now it wasn’t
Kay who
transfixed me
on my cross
of desire:
her green
eyes shouting
yes o yes
in the dark
of that parking
lot were just
the nails:
The ancient
Greek lyric
poet Meleager
said it right
when he wrote
“In my heart
Eros himself
created sweet
voiced Melissa,
the soul of
my soul”: For
a time Kay
was the soul
of my soul,
sent by Eros
as a doublebarbed
arrow of sweet
and bitter and
grace and curse
and ocean
and eternal pit:
That music
deafened my
rock rages
with roses
and nipples:
“I swear, I
swear it
by Eros,” I /
Would rather
hear her whisper
in / my ear
than listen
to Apollo
playing his lyre,”
quoth Meleager
again, a
startling statement
for a poet
of the ages
but infernally
true: Do you
think you
prefer to sit
here writing of
lost loves and
not-so-timeless
rock n roll
when I
could instead
be yet riding
that wave, the
shape of pure
dolphin abandon?
Ah but who
ever gets to
choose such
things: Cupid is
whimsical and
scattershot:
Adult Eros
marries Psyche
& trades his
wings for the
daily labors of
earthbound
love: Yet he
never stops
being a lover:
And that old
magic music
entrances me
still: It winds
throughout
and down this
descending
stair of
memory which
I call Breviary:
I chase old
loves in the
Otherworld of
crafted dream
& return with
a ring of
fire within
my gold wedding
ring: A sulphurous
lion mates the
vernal queen:
At week’s end
Kay and I
drove out
to New Smyrna
Beach where
we registered
at some surfside
hotel as a
married couple
and climbed at
last into
the cool sheets
of a bed:
Labial folds
of naked
softly plashing
surf in
a darkened
room and the
two of us
clenched in
our coil
of immortal
fire, panting
rising spasming
& littering sleeve
after sleeve
of Fourex on
the floor: The
next morning
we walked on
the beach --
me in shorts
and Kay in a
bikini which
fit her loosely
(relics of
a past season,
of an old
passion) --
The sun just
up from an
eastern marl
of cloud, soft
80º breezes, the
sea a quilt
of coral
and cerulean
folds with
crest of spermlike
foam, sandpipers
flittering by
our feet:
Kay had stopped
to pick up
a shell and
when she rose
up again to
look at me
with her back to
the sea &
the sun flooding
her every
hair and soft
full curve
with the
richest ripest
most pernicious
gold & in
that instant
she was Thetis
or Circe
or Aphrodite
herself just
off the
foam of the
old father’s
balls: Freeze
that moment
and fire it
from the
bow of bios
right through my
birthmark &
deep into my
soul to
pierce the soul
of my soul,
harrowing me
with an
utter presence-
in-absence
I will
forever sing:


NEIL McODRUM ANDTHE SELKIE

Long ago, on an island at the northern edge of the world, there lived a fisherman called Neil McCodrum. He lived all alone in a stone croft where the moorland meets the shore, with nothing but the guillemots for company and the stirring of the sand among the shingle for song.

But in the long winter evenings he would sit by the peat-fire and watch the blue smoke curling up to the roof, and his eyes looked far and far away as if he was looking into another country. And sometimes, when the wind rustled the bent-grass on the machair, he seemed to hear a soft voice sighing his name.
One spring evening, the men of the clachan were bringing their boats full of herring into shore. They swung homeward with glad hearts, and their wives lit the rushlights, so that the wide world dwindled to a warm quiet room. Neil McCodrum was the last to drag his boat up the shingle and hoist the creel of fish upon his back. He stood a while watching the seabirds fly low towards the headland, their wings dark against the evening sky, then turned to trudge up the shingle to the croft on the machair.

It was as he turned, he saw something move in the shadows of the rocks. A glimmer of white and then - he heard it between birds’ cries - high laughter like silver. He set down the creel, and with careful steps he neared the rocks, hardly daring to breathe, and hid behind the largest one. And then he saw them - seven girls with long dark flowing hair, naked and white as the swans on the lake, dancing in a ring where the shoreline met the sea.

And now his eye caught something else - a shapeless pile of speckled brown skins lying heaped like seaweed on a boulder nearby. Now Neil knew that they were selkie, who are seals in the sea, but when they come to land, take off their skins and appear as human women.
Humped low so he would not be seen, Neil McCodrum crept towards the pile of skins, and slowly slid the top one down. But scarcely had he rolled it up and put it under his coat, than one of the selkie gave a sharp cry. The dance stopped, the circle broke, and the girls ran to the boulder, slipped into their skins and slithered into the rising tide, shiny brown seals that glided away into the dark night sea.

All but one.

She stood before him as white as a pearl, as still as frost in starlight. She stared at him with great dark eyes, then slowly she held out her hand, and said in a voice that trembled with silver:

“Ochone, ochone! Please give me back my skin.”
He took a step towards her and she stared at him with large brown eyes that held the depths of the sea.

“Come with me,” he said, “I will give you new clothes to wear.”

The wedding of Neil McCodrum and the selkie woman was set for the time of the waxing moon and the flowing tide. All the folk of the clachan came, six whole sheep were roasted and the whiskey ran like water. Toasts overflowed from every cup for the new bride and groom, who sat at the head of the table: McCodrum, beaming and awkward, unused to pleasure, tapped his spoon to the music of fiddle and pipe, but the woman sat quietly beside him at the bride-seat, and seemed to be listening to another music that had in it the sound of the sea.

After a while she bore him two children, a boy and a girl, who had the sandy hair of their father, but the great dark eyes of their mother, and there were little webs between their fingers and toes. Each day, when Neil was out in his boat, she and her children would wander along the machair to gather wild parsnips and berries, or fill their creels with carrageen from the rocks at low tide. She seemed settled enough in the croft on the shore, and in May-time when the air was scented with thyme and roseroot and the children ran towards her, their arms full of wild yellow irises, she was almost happy. But when the west wind brought rain, and strong squalls of wind that whistled through the cracks in the croft walls, she grew restless and moved about the house as if swaying to unseen tides, and when she sat at the spinning-wheel, she would hum a strange song as the fine thread streamed through her fingers. McCodrum hated these times and would sit in the dark peat-corner glowering at her over his pipe, but unable to say a word.

Thirteen summers had passed since the selkie woman came to live with McCodrum, and her children were almost grown. As she knelt on the warm earth one afternoon, digging up silverweed roots to roast for supper, the voice of her daughter Morag rang clear and excited through the salt-pure air and soon the girl was beside her holding something in her hands.
“O mother! Is this not the strangest thing I have found in the old barley-kist, softer than the mist to my touch?”

Her mother rose slowly to her feet, and in silence ran her hand along the speckled brown skin. It was smooth like silk. She held it to her breast with one hand, and put her other arm around her daughter, and walked back with her to the croft in silence, heedless of the girl’s puzzled stares. Once inside, she called her son Donald to her, and spoke gently to her children:
“I will soon be leaving you, mo chridhe, and you will not see me again in the shape I am in now. I go not because I do not love you, but because I must become myself again.”

That night, as the moon sailed white as a pearl over the western sea, the selkie woman rose, leaving the warm bed and slumbering husband. She walked alone to the silent shore and took off her clothes, one by one, and let them fall to the sand. Then she stepped lightly over the rocks and unrolled the speckled brown parcel she carried with her, and held it up before her. For one moment maybe she hesitated, her head turning back to the dark, sleeping croft on the machair; the next, she wrapped the shining skin about her and dropped into the singing water of the sea.

For a while a sleek brown head could be seen in the dip and crest of the moon-dappled waves, pointing ever towards the far horizon, and then, swiftly leaping and diving towards her, came six other seals. They formed a circle around her and then all were lost to view in the soft indigo of the night.

In the croft on the machair, Neil McCodrum stirred, and felt for his wife, but his hand encountered a cold and empty hollow. He knew better than to look for her and he also knew she would never come to him again. But when the moon was young and the tide waxing, his children would not sleep at night, but ran down to the sands on silent webbed feet. There, by the rocks on the shoreline, they waited until she came - a speckled brown seal with great dark eyes. Laughing and calling her name, they splashed into the foaming water and swam with her until the break of day.

-- Fiona McLeod, Iona




SELKIE LOVE

March 19, 2006

Little did I know she was a selkie
on that shore, dazzling my
eye with morning surf and salt
after a long tumulting night.
She stepped into my eye
from a sealksin thousands
of miles and years from where
we stood, across that soft blue
ocean behind her, on a train
of glittery sunlight fresh
upon the waters which travelled
as far out as down my eye
and brain and heart and
balls and feet to soul
to a memory as old as the
love of all my fathers
for all the women they had
dreamed and once or
twice believed. I knew none
of that back then: The
moment of her standing
there in a loosely fitting
bikini (a remainder
of other summers,
other lovers)
was pure, perfect, and
sublimely actual, as if
to reach a shore at last
of love’s most inward
baptism. To see her
standing there it
seemed I was in
my heart at last, or
her’s, or our’s. My
dream was in the
way she tilted her
head and smiled
with a voltage equal
to the sun rising behind
her on the dazzling sea;
some molten fire
gilded her curves
and curly hair, grounded
in blue waters at
her feet which foamed
soft and warm toward me.
Nothing had prepared me
for that moment, nor
had I any alm or balm
for all that followed
as we drove inland
& futilely tried to live that
day, selkie wife and
mortal man condemned
to reach for the other
where no sea, no
inland air endured.
Blindly and stupidly
I tried to nail her to
that beach as she
surely ebbed back
into the crashing sea
which was not
meant for me, not
actually, nor ever.
She soon became
a lovely disappeared
thing the tide now
sings on sands
far down my ear.
Only much later
in the slow salve
of aging years did
I come to read how
that scene has been
enacted as long as
men have dreamed of
women from the sea,
telling those old tales
to each other at
seaside taverns and
on midnight decks of
boats where stars
burned so bright above
that eyes stared up
from the folds and
crests of waves, up
from the heart of hearts.
The wisdom of the
ages is that selkies
are no wives, her
heat not meant
for hearths, a song
to keep offshore.
Such beloveds stay
only as long as a
man connives to hide
their water-gowns;
but at night while
mortals sleep,
the selkies swim deep
down our ears,
rummaging through
every vault and locker
there til at last salt
gossamer is found and
the spell of landlocked
love unbound.
Once she learned
how desperate I was
she flipped her tail
and was gone, a blue echo
in a door which still
washes with the sea,
cold and empty and
heartbreakingly beautiful
as the moonlight which
hangs heavy over
our garden this early
morning. The wife I found
after that selkie swam
away sleeps deep upstairs,
my lovely, despairing,
aging and menopausal
wife, difficult in all the
ways that selkie seemed
to easy, free, and young
before she disappeared.
Did I have to learn the
story of the seal-wife
to loose her from
within, as if to
name an archetype
was like hauling free
the anchor
of a wreck far undersea
which stayed hooked
through my heart
for years, allowing
me to come ashore
and work the
inland life that’s mine?
And though I’m not fully
freed from the surflike sound
of how she disappeared
I’m free to whistle
and croon it here
where once I drowned.
The selkie wife is
a tale now in my creel,
still wonderful and
sleek and darkly blue,
a shape of words
which I offer you,
son of my long lost
reader, to make of it
as you will and sooth
and do as you soak
in your own history’s
blue brine. Oh she
was so lovely standing
there, Venus off the
wave, the dream of that
immortal love which no
ring can troth
nor by keeping save.
Be well, o one who
was all and could
never be: Bewitch
the swells and
rouse the tale.



MAC ODRUM

2005

It is given to them (the seal-
tribe of MacOdrum) that their
sea-longing shall be land-longing
and their land-longing shall
be sea-longing.

— South Uist farmer

Shall I forever row
this rock which flaunts
below so brute a tail
and brogues the wind
like flukes? Standing
here do I forever
ride the wave
which answers every
shore with blue recede?
Surely I was just the next
nude nallie to lose his skin
in your embrace, doomed
thus to build his lives
ashore with the greater
half of the three hearts
pursed in your abyssal blue.
Half-man half fish
between the worlds
I weave my three
dark songs of fin
and breast and
thrall, that music
riven as the tide
which pounds these
rocky cliffs where
you are least of all.
Will you ever give
me back my skin,
that oiled black frock
which I must wear
to dive full back to
the single world,
free of doubletalk at last?
Shall I woo you or connive,
do I ravage the verses
or mount the mare I ride?
Such strategems
I dream atop this lonely
rock which is my writing
chair, reaching out as
far as I know how
to kiss the cross still
burning there, inscribed
aeons ago when love
was young and I woke
in your arms, a naked,
fresh-borne man 18 miles
out to sea with no
way ever to go home.
Your breath has
stayed in my ear
for all these lives,
like the sea inside
a shell, a shining
blue tide my song
has slowly pickled in.
Three cups, three
heavens, three purgatories
here beyond the ninth
wave you folded and
crashed over me —
a charnel house of
every thrill and thrall
to fade from blue to black.
I hear the selkies singing
on moony nights as
this an hour from
first light: I write
their sealskins down.
Inside this oratory
on high rock I
nail that strange music
to my own, a revenant
still revenant of
the blue which
drowned my bones.


CRYSTAL SHORES

2004


Again and again I walk
these crystal shores
where you and I
once met and since
and ever dream.
The tide here is swift
and vast and
septiernally one to one
in its scrolling psalter
of wave after wave,
each one curved and curled
with your every latent
lucency, each one
crashing to crystal
smithereens on that
pale sand, erasing
the prints our feet
left behind. I voyage
every day day from this
white chair to that
pale shore where night
hauls back its sheets
revealing the palest of
pale blues around your
ankles, like moon-glazed
wavelets of ice or
the filaments of your eyes
which lit on me and lured
me out to drown the bottom
of all seas. All that remains
today is the music of that
motion at the wild
shore of an ocean
I’ll never see again,
much less walk hand
in hand ensouled with you.
I became the man you
dreamed you saw
that high cathedral night,
a rogue wanderer
no more, by days the
firm husbandman of love,
in early morning matins
a monk writing down
a crystal-seeming sound
on pages that go deeper
and beyonder than
I ever had real balls to go.
Your fantasy became
the phantasm who burned
through all my years
like a torch, leading me
beyond those ghostly
ghastly wastes where
you never to be found
into this shire of wet
surrender where you
are so meltingly afoot,
so fleetingly agleam.
Here the moon of our
imagined history ignites
each massive wave
I ride toward you
& the smashing tumult of
that foam keeps that
heart--or its memory-- alive.
I’m happy to leave you
here with the offshore breeze
flinging your soft hair
& my song secreted
away inside your black
silk selkie’s thunder-
underwear: To shut
the covers of this
bone-white book
and head upstairs
to join my wife in bed,
telling her how much I
love her as I slowly
stroke her feet: And let
the day slowly wash
in through our big windows
to name our married
day where I’m growing older
and have so much work
left to do. That jazzy
blue periphery that you
and I walked once
is the sweet and simple
liturgy I daily ring, like a
crystal angelus. Lauding
each wave’s kiss of
noctilucent noir, adding
it to that one, incessant,
vastly booming choir.



BORDERLING

2005

Borderling I am,
of sea and shore
composed, a sand
which slips through
dark blue veins
from every bed
I’ve loved. Soul-
doors are packed
but hard where
waves have smashed
and roared, a road
worn smooth by
the feet of selkies
who have wandered in
and we who have walked
those crashing miles
searching for your
smile again. Here
is where worlds
mist and wash
to greet in songs
as old those strange
fish who first crawled
beyond the sea.
That land still
feels the ache of gills
no longer fanning blue,
sea angels and their
swift dragon left
behind to myths
forever drowned.
Here is where love
plunged me deep
into a sweet tide’s
psaltery, baptising
me in crash and swoon,
forever haunting every
wave with strange
ebbed quietus which
erased your smile at last.
Betrothed and sworn
I am to that infernal
wash that stained
my life half-blue,
bleached and burnt
by its shore-vowelings,
my feet shod in that
homeless wave
which voyages on
to every isle you
once slept in,
bedding your
resonance, entranced
with the fading
perfume that is
mixed in every tide.
This song grows
smooth as sea-glass
with day’s wave,
shoring the pale
throat which ferries
blue between
divinities, dominions
of soul at least --
heart wild as the
pagan sea, the mind
building its chapel
on those blue bones,
writing down the
waves. Here is my
country of birth,
my native tongue
of foam and breeze:
an oh-so-narrow isthmus
of sand-packed page
between eternal marges
of brine and fire,
of spume and torpor.
It’s a death of sorts
to remain here
where you will not
return, long after all
wrack of actual beaches
have long washed away:
Yet each walk before
first light refrains
the voice way down
which rose so many
lives ago. Borderling
of blue I am,
psalmist of that tide
on which all lovers
dreamers &
changelings on
blue angels ride.



ANNIVERSARY

2002

Today it’s been twenty years
since I lost the second woman
I hardly knew yet I loved
in full, stupid, jealous & greedy.
In losing her I became
so desperately and infernally
alive as to beg silence: her shade.

All I remember of her today
is that morning we walked
on Cocoa Beach after fucking
most of the night. We were
making small talk in our
dreamy exhaustion—laughing
at the way sandpipers scurry
like tiny execs— when she
paused and smiling at me
in front of dawning sea.
The whole package I recall—
that smile, the blue eyes streaming,
the curly blond hair in a halo
of sun, her breasts full
and straining against
a year-old bikini top, the
sea crashing light foam
at her ankles like cream,
that evanescent breeze—
all of that was greater than
any morning, a finally found key.
Yet that was only true
in reverse, when she told
me at last to go to hell.
but in reverse. I recall
how I hurt bad enough
in the proceeding months
to see beyond the heat
into caring at last about
how I lived love.
How the days slowed
in the viscosity of grief,
a sludge both anguished
and gorgeous, slowing
the day to a wave-crawl,
the sunlight lengthening
across the lakes.
That image spoiled my drinking
for the next 4 years
though I tried, reaching
for her on every tree.
to care last about how
Eventually I came to
marry that shape,
sacrificing the wild
night of making love
for long hard days
of patient making.
Love doesn’t teach us
how much there is to
gain in love, only
how much there is to lose
by not loving, or failing
to love well enough.
Today I recall those long
burnished days in September
when grief was a tide
tolling a sea
I’d been born to in losing.
Stupid, jealous, greedy,
it’s true, but also the wound
which eventually bled me real.
I sit in the house I prayed
that day to inhabit,
the sum of every surrender
I made to love’s brine,
it’s awfullest, most
incompetent son,
each smile a wine
so much more difficult now
so much more
what she only kissed.





ONE LOVE,
ONE SONG

2004

Singing cannot much avail
unless the song wells from the heart,
unless it’s noble love you feel.
My singing’s then supreme. For, bold
in the deep joy of my love, I hold
and still direct my mouth, my heart,
my eyes, my understanding art.

-- Bernart de Ventadour (12th cent.)
transl. Jack Lindsay

My love for you and this song
are one in this singular travail
across the empty, gorgeous sea.
Though my ways seem
pathless, I follow my heart
which knows the way
through the wilderness
of waves, seeing with
eyes we share the deeper
darker path of love, an
ache as low as the moon
hangs high over that
silver, abyssal tide.
Our love cannot be
requited though nothing
else will do than that
day or night when
we’ll merge at last
and dream and drift
off together into an
endless, clear blue space.
No matter all the
mortal loves that failed
to find you. No matter
all the instruments I’ve
blunted in my dowse
and reach for you -- penis,
guitar, pen, boat-prow.
No matter this ocean
of ink that grows
between us, filling
the hallows of your
every departure (or
were they all mine?)
with angel-burning tears.
All that matters is
the pure note welling
in my throat with
clarion and halcyon
desire, lofted over that
crystal thalassa like
a breast of pale blue milk
or the lucence of that
afterglow which brimmed
a few beds on a few
nights along this lifelong
row to you. I’m just
another luckless troubadour
marked from birth to
ache and sing to you,
my lady of royal blue seem.
Perchance today I
sing well enough of you
to stir you from your dream.
Smile for me just once
on whatever shore you
now walk. Bless these
penny verses with with
glint of your pure silver.
Kiss me once just over
the crest of the wave
I send to you from
the bottom of this art.



APPARITION

2004

In this next great season
I can feel her rising from the sea,
the shape of summer rages
composed of mist and and sun and surf
and orange groves dreaming of
winter juice, and coral drouths
we love to work and love and
sleep together in. A sine-wave
essence of her makes of days
a gentling, smiling drench
and of every opened heart
the still-toss of the drowned.
Call her Isis or Venus or Our Lady,
hail her Mother or My Love
or the breasts of history: She
is the tide which ebbs and flows
with one sure voice,
in eyes deeper than the sea’s.
Days now not so much pass as
dance on, in love with summer’s lead.
Buds unfurled now in sail-like blooms,
a scent-bath rises from her breasts.
My song in hers rose here long ago,
perhaps long before my count
of years. I am that child of summer
that she dreamt inside the
emulsions of the sea, up
the aching balustrades of a sea-
breeze storm. My words
once freed of this pale hand
are grains fro her cathedral beach,
siliclastic island no dayside
use can ever row to reach.
Pour ‘em all into this crystal bowl
bounded by our spring and fall:
The glass is summers, the water
Your’s, its depth all mine
to hallow with a song which
makes of summers and all kisses long.