It started with a tentative tug, a touch confined
without a glance or the pressure of a hand.
Then it teased me like a simple, other mind
across my own, vibrating with command.
Then I almost fell, as she charged high, and fanned
open her tailfins, arching through the spray
of her own raging white wake. Don’t look away;

Listen! I breathed, and she tore away the line,
and showed me her face—those empty eyes—beside
the dock. She howled, stretching her hand to mine,
floating her tail in the rocking of the tide
as she clung to the slippery post below. I tried
to look at her and saw that it was true.
What would you have done? I helped her through

the railing. Draped with clammy seaweed strands,
she wiggled her huge shoulders down and lay
flopping along the pier, with her open hands
still held towards me. Now I know that was the day
I lost my mind. She’s followed me the way
a beggar could haunt a doorway. She’s in my shade
whenever I feel empty or afraid.

Look at her now; by now she’s growing old.
We hear her every night, that singing, through
the heartless air, carried on the cold
enchantment of the California dew,
futile and endless notes, a wordless clue
poured out over the deafened land. I wish,
sometimes, I’d thrown her back in like a fish,

when I saw her breasts. A mother! I still can’t say
if my fishing hook killed it, or if she
dropped it in the struggle, but of course it died that day.
And I know wherever it fell, there must be
a shrinking in the waves, the hissing sea,
a crust of sand still thickening on the edge
of its quiet bones.

First collected in Eve (Story Line Press, 1997, Reprinted by Carnegie Mellon University Press Contemporary Classics Poetry Series, 2011).