They're driftwood, or worn buoys - <br />now as they stand up out of the water <br />and stare towards the shore, they're living mineral, <br />like people with only rudimentary eyes. <br />And now I see one closer, see it dive, <br />and realize they're seals. Lifting slicked <br />black heads, disappearing back down - <br />they're seals. At this distance, soundless, <br />though at other times I've heard seals cry: <br />pure non-human cries that go <br />to the human bitter root. They're out <br />of some unknown watery testament <br />made of their cries, their wavering gentle <br />screams. Now I see a dozen of them <br />farther off, sunning themselves on a log boom - <br />solid blacknesses bathing lazily <br />in the long late rays. They roll, <br />all black torso like the mummified <br />Pharaohs, the immortals of the once-imagined <br />Egyptian ancestors of the familiar ones, <br />the Gypsies who flit in and out of sight, <br />baptizing themselves in the dark nothing <br />at the savage margins. They roll over <br />into the water and are gone. Then bob up <br />new and black, being born again and again <br />into their blackness. Now I see that same one <br />swimming close, almost to the shore, <br />lifting liquid-like black and craning - it comes closer <br />as if I had whistled it up, asking for it, <br />and it had come, one of my lost ones, <br />my Gypsy dead. Seals all I can know now <br />of any of them. Seals that look out <br />in insouciant, terrible love - and can only <br />be other than seals because they're seals.<br /><br />Russell Thornton<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/harbour-seals/
