Here is a poem swimming up from the deep, having slumbered forgotten for some time in the files. Buried Treasure indeed. Our poet Fiona Clark reminds us that the Greek hippokampus means “horse sea monster”. Johan Creten is a Flemish sculptor. Day 651 of the daily poems.
Three views of a seahorse
After a sculpture by Johan Creten
I am seahorse. A breaking wave, surging
black, with a clash and crash of my white foaming hooves
on gravelly shores.
I am seahorse. Hippocampus. Small sea-creature.
Am pink-green, tender flower-fern,
flowing in the undertow. Curled tail,
an exoskeleton of grace. I am a dance of graces,
in my raw-toothed coral bed.
My head is horse. My nose is not horse, long, lean snout of a dragon.
I am. Am not.
Am dinosaur. Am filigree of deep-sea masonry.
Am straining to be free.
See how my forelegs pile against my heart-space,
cluttering hooves, kicking clumsily,
coal-black club-foot foal of darkness.
Am cleft in two. Cleft open. My cleft
a place to enter,
to be entered, to be rent asunder.
I am deformed, huge, demonic, a monster,
Behemoth, fifth horse of the apocalypse,
rearing from the pit against clear shafts of light of
heaven’s clerestory.
Am fragment
of shining shell,
artefact of honeycomb.
But look again, walk round, come down deeper :
Am only an embryo, a curling spine,
a half-formed thing, mollusc-vulnerable,
sea-snail-soft, a puff of plankton,
drifting on wayward currents,
gauzy as beaded butter-muslin
on a jug of cream, a delicate trail of blood,
sea-silk veil, drifting caul, anemone.
A shifting shadow.
Silhouette of nothingness.
I did not ask to be me.
Fiona Clark