Seals

Seals

People here used to believe

that drowned souls lived in the seals.

At spring tides they might change shape.

They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer

in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,

his shoulder to the jamb, his song

a rowboat far out in the evening.

 

                                    Seamus Heaney

There’s enough Irish here that to look at a seal now

would pull a bit of an ache to the teeth, that instead

of whistling there’d be a small groan, a burn begun

in the stomach, a bottom place no one ever knows

they stand on until that knock on the door, the politest ‘Ma’am’

you ever heard, as though a bung has been pulled

and all the color is leached, grey as a baby

seal beneath the water, popping up between breakers,

whiskers thick with—oh I don’t know—just thick.  The twitch

in the nose.  It’s as though they’re always crying,

eyes a puddle of shoe black, tar black, molasses black

a fall into a never surface again black.  And though it seems

they laugh and bark and snorkel and curl and twist, an excited

big boned puppy—soon, don’t you want

to say soon, the laugh is a whisper, is a thin whistle, is,

because you believe some of it or need to, a hum

 

of a hymn, a little too surly for church, but just enough fun

for seals.  Babies play, doing the world without

requirement.  This old notion mystique of girls in seal

skin, of guardians of the drowned, is, standing on this break

water, believable.  The closer they get, the braver we both

are in the water, it’s more real every moment, the tide

coming up like lips, starting at the feet, receding, coming

back, each time, depending on the moon-clock, depending on

skin slick with salt and oil, depending on staying.  This solid

spine of rip-rap, bolted to the floor of our sea, shifts while we

watch seals and ignore the prominent chain of Danger: Keep

Out we walk past.  Because we think we've conquered 

water, we're finally stronger, sure footed, keen.  We are.  Don't

we believe it, have to, when the baby cries and pulls away 

from comfort and takes that first step, swaying but keeping it because they saw

the bob and dip of their kin and want to run to them, be them.