Between the imaginary iceberg an the skeletal whale
is the stuffed and mounted mermaid in her case,
the crudely-stitched seam between skin and scale
so unlike Herbert Draper's siren dreams, loose
on the swelling tide, part virgin and part harpy.
Her post-mortem hair and her terrible face
look more like P.T. Barnum's Freak of Feejee,
piscene and wordless, trapped in the net of a stare.
She has the head and shrivelled tits of a monkey
the green glass eyes of a porcelain doll, a pair
of praying-mantis hands, and fishy lips
open to reveal her sea-carved mouth, her rare
ivory mermaid-teeth. Children breathe and rap
on the glass to make her move. In her fixity
she's as far as can be from the selkie who slips
her wet pelt on the beaches of Orkney
and walks as a woman, pupils widened in light,
discarding the stuffed sack of her body.
Without hearing, or touch, or taste, or smell, or sight
she echoes the numb roll of the whale
in a sea congealed with cold, when it was thought
no beast could be as nerveless as the whale.
-- Caitriona O'Reilly
[Pia, 2022]
