Swimming with Seals
By Gillian Clarke
Two horizons:
a far blue line where a ship
diminishes and the evening sun
lets slip;
and submarine
where we glimpse stars and shoals
and shadowy water-gardens
of what’s beyond us.
When the seal rises
she rests her chin on the sea
as we do, and tames us with her gaze.
On shore the elderly
bask beside their cars
at the edge of what they’ve lost,
and shade their eyes
and lift binoculars.
She’s gone,
apt to the sea’s grace
to watch us underwater from her place,
you with your mask and fins,
strolling the shallow gardens of the sea,
me, finding depth
with a child’s flounder of limbs,
hauling downwards on our chains of breath.
For a moment the old
looking out to sea,
all earth’s weight beneath their folding chairs,
see only flawless blue to the horizon,
while we in seconds of caught air,
swim down against buoyancy,
rolling in amnion
like her September calf.
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Friday started as a nice, cool, overcast day, but we knew the outer bands of Hurricane Ian would be arriving in the afternoon. So after lunch, we went to the post office before the rain started coming down, and the rest of the afternoon involved finishing up post-trip chores and trying to catch up on email. We didn't have dinner with my parents because they might have been exposed to covid from friends and we might have been exposed to covid in Seattle, plus two of us are sore from flu shots.
So we ate ravioli for dinner, then we watched The Rings of Power, which did something The Hobbit movies never got right and managed a lot of character development during a long battle scene. I can't believe there are only two episodes left in the season. Now we're watching The Greatest Beer Run Ever, whose performances are better than a somewhat oversimplified script, but I'm not sorry it hammers home the anti-war message. Here are seals we saw illicitly fishing in Ballard Locks in Seattle:
