But a mermaid has no tears
and, therefore, suffers so much more.
Hans Christian Andersen
.
All night I dreamt of land. Of soil
crumbling through my fingers to leave
black parings under broken nails,
.
of fields spread with dung and that melancholy
light of autumn, the colours of clay and fire,
where morning has a yellow tongue.
.
Could I exist in air?
In this oceanic deep you lie embedded
in the womb of my heart,
.
attached by an umbilicus of longing,
my aqueous nightgown transparent
as air.
.
I don’t even know who this you is.
Though I’ve pictured your all too human body
naked on my bed of cowrie shells,
.
visualised our house of cloth and tar,
ash walls mortared with the glue
of boiled fish bones.
.
Water accepts everything,
even the misshapen.
Over and over I’ve tried to imagine
.
a need for balance,
that slow steadying of the inner ear,
metatarsals pushing into solid ground.
.
Yet though I wait and wait
time returns me only to myself
as night to morning,
.
as sea to the shore,
so, where your voice
should be, there is only silence.
.
.