Depths to Sink to

She was chewing gum, unused to it.  Graceless in her mouth, though I knew she always glided to the pier.

Barefoot, barefoot, against a brackish wind, I went to her.

I’d sold every possession for my last love.

Her jeans seemed new, though I mistook sodden denim for her mermaid’s tail.  She spoke first in a curling lilt sweetened with mint. Her voice grew wise when she tossed away the gum and told me I’d been torn from someone else.

She winked.

‘I’ll distract you,’ she said, pointing to a shape beside her. ‘Put on this fish-skin and follow me.’ 

The touch of her hand on my arm was cold as the winter waves.

We tumbled backwards to the sea beneath, down cerulean shafts, diving to sly depths, carried by ageless currents streaked in frothy peridot and emerald.  The scalloped curve of her tail churned bubbles; from them she assembled the only word still binding me.

A name unable to be submerged.

The descent was endless, a delight of pressure and silence, ceasing too soon – as ever does the best of love.  She spiralled, supple as kelp, warning me I wasn’t the first to enter her world.

There, she showed me, a sword planted and encrusted, flung by some careless knight or a drowned lover.  It awaited new vows, a quest, or perhaps a king.

‘These things find me as regularly as the tides,’ she told me. ‘See, scattered on the floor, the iridescence of scales and coral, gleamings of pearls and teeth.’ 

Ah, the teeth!  Shoals of fish swayed and merged, unfurling their hues across fathoms, crowding upon us as cousins.

Below, too, the litter of willing foes – leaks of oil, bones, bells, and glory.  Beyond, the arrayed treasure of split old ships that once adored even gales, carrying the cackle of pirate crews.

‘See the gold amongst the memory of timbers and bold canvas?  Carry handfuls back.’

And she laughed.  For the coins couldn’t be grasped, slipping as they ought through the sleeky overlap of scales.

Instead, we held each other, squeezed in our briny embrace, a small ecstasy.  Her hand rested on my chest; I couldn’t lie.  My greater ache was for the mermaid and not for real air, my own dry kind and a memory.  

Later, fetched up on a beach, breath filled me as she demanded what love felt like.  I told her of grit in my mouth, the blaze of sun, and at my back, a thousand tiny razoring shells.  We watched the remnants of the fish-skin blister upon my flesh.  

‘You could’ve buried your lost love in the sea,’ she said.  She turned her head to the sea.

I had yet to see her smile. 

‘Return with me,’ she said.

Her eyes were a clearer, deeper treasure than the ones I had beheld.  

‘Stay with me,’ I asked.  

She lay beside me, her jeans unbuttoned in invitation, though her legs and feet remained fused.

Oh, her smile.

‘Gladly, I would dwell in your world,’ she said, ‘except for the price of shoes.’