There was a dead seal, killed by the old men up to their new tricks,
the dead water below the salmon pens.
The tide that usually moves all things along
kept bringing it back to the same spot,
rolling it over the pebbles by the rickety dock.
The big body dark and heavy as the sea
lodged in the cove for six hours or more each day,
and I would sit with it.
I would pagan pray with smoke and flame
that it would return again the next day,
and it did. And every day there was less of it,
some gone to the silver gulls, flying,
some drifting down to the narrow fish in the sleepless dark.
One day a woman found me there
and told how she longed in her loneliness to be wedded to the sea,
to put on a seal dress and walk down an aisle of waves.
She painted pictures like this, and showed them to me.
At first I thought, a creature like me.
It didn't take long for the skeleton to emerge.
Each day I picked from the rocks another vertebra, another rib
come clean. She came again and looked at my heap of bones, and I offered them
but her eyes were on the head. You keep the scaffolding, she said,
all of it. I only want the skull. If you get it, will you give it to me?
I couldn't say no, although I knew it in my marrow.
The soft body is a cloak, a curtain,
and when the dark engine quits, the body opens
without regret, disowns itself by way of dissolution.
It happened in tide-time that the seal was broken,
the woman with dolphin dreams could have been the wind.
Then, only a fierce tendon kept the head to the housing of the heart.
It is harder than you think to part them
but I could tell when the moment was right,
when the skull was the only bright thing
in the sinking day, the twilight of blues and sea-crows,
so I pulled, and it hurt,
and the spaces around the jawbone swirled with the song of where I found it,
for the skull is stronger than a promise
and white as a wedding.
Born and raised in Tasmania, Cally Conan-Davies is a writer and photographer who lives by the sea. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, Harvard Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Dark Horse.