Kayaks

Our uncle in prison
sculpts bearpelts from soapstone,
tattooed his own shoulder:
a road-gang of caribou

gnawing the tundra,
the musk ox, the grey goose,
my brother and I
racing kayaks on meltwater.

Mermaids

We'd explode from the change in pressure
before we saw daylight, and anyway
evolution has sheathed our eyes as dead ends.
We live by taste, which is really smell;
we taste what's diffused in water
and sense the direction. Carcasses mostly.

We've kept a vague idea of our shape:
wing-spindles propelling us forward,
armoured backplate, excretory organs.
But sex is a mystery. Our best guess
has males as the krill-like specks
which winkle, sometimes, under our chitin.

We sing to each other in pheromone, never
certain how message matches to sender.
Sometimes we taste our long past's echo.
We cultivate theories on the existence
of dry land; our theology is loneliness. We hang
translucent in love's deepwater trenches.

 Monolith

The perfect wardrobe, hand-tooled,
unaffordable, dark innards
rippling with vicuna and merino

overlooked, hunched in a patch
of shade, a standing stone
he made love at the foot of.

He saw it as his Old Retainer,
straight-grained, drily jovial,
when really it was his Hollow God.