She calls him from a thousand miles distance –
sends forth an invisible cord
from her edge of cliff
to his edge of existence.
She calls him in autumn storms,
in summer stillness,
grooves a new migration route,
moons him towards her
for tide after tide.
Some claim, with disdain,
that she practised with sprats; some beg
her to tame their cats
and mend their lame horses.
Others whisper that she’s aiming
to become one, and hide
from her gaze, for upgrading
to rorqual takes whole shores of sorcery
compared with subsiding into seal.
She knows when he’s close
from the tingle of krill on her tongue,
the pulse of his infrasonic hum
in her thighs, the unpleating
of her throat as she hazards a smile.
Though she’s tiring, awed by his size,
she relies on no lyre to draw
him; no piping raises him, swaying,
from the waves. And when he finally arrives,
she defies the precipice, leans further,
further, further over the side, to tell
him why she fetched him, words stranding
between them like baleen:
Not to contrive more scientific lies,
not for those men rubbing krónur
from their eyes, but to show
that my kind need not be predators.
For no other reason but to see.
Part of The Learned Pig’s Wolf Crossing editorial season, spring/summer 2017.
Image credit: Norman Ackroyd, Evening Rain Papa Stour, etching, 2014. Via Royal Academy.
