[verse]

When I was a boy there were mermaids in the river.

I saw them as we submerged behind tempered glass –

Their tails woven from mother-of-pearl,

Hair of golden seaweed,

And scallop shells for modesty,

Darted in a clearing where a leviathan

Gorged over boiling springs,

Or sunned on the rocks,

Adorned with violet hyacinths.

For years they sang to me across oceans,

Just as they lured the Argonauts to their doom,

Or beckoned to the Mariner as he sailed to the edge of the world.

I met them in Klimt’s gilded dreams,

In Isamu’s animate stone,

Heard their voices in Volkhova’s grim lullaby

And in Rusalka’s paean to the pock-marked moon.

Desirable and treacherous,

To accept their kiss is to drown

In the chasm of their fathomless eyes.

After many years I returned to be with them,

But the sunken theatre blinded by algae,

Removed by great cranes and discarded,

A clear, still pool in its stead.

I searched the banks in vain,

But they had migrated to where the sea meets the sky.