The first night, we settled you with a spell
of firelight laced with morphine.

You said you could feel the sea,
warm waves washing everything away.

We judged time passing in the thinning
of limbs and hair, learnt to equalise

the strange swim bladders the surgeon
had to stitch to your skin. A glitch

in the transition. Your metamorphosis
brought the priest with his prayers and nods.

And a pain that would frighten gods away.
After they left, dreams of sea monsters

found us. A terror rising from the deep
to rip houses apart, crush the little

screaming people under its feet.
Fight back, we said. Don’t let go.

A week later, your mouth hung open
on the blunt hooks of our words

and only glossy backdrops of the ocean
soothed you. The living room – a tank

where we watched your legs split
into ribbons and skin give way to scales.

Call it evolution. Call it what you will,
but a million years from now

I’d still be able to recall every detail.
Every dark slit of gill. How a girl can

drown behind eyes bright as moonlit
pools. The fishy stink of you.

And that one frosty morning
when I choked myself awake into a day

purified by ice, crept to the window
to see the world in its white coat,

and a sky full of promise flaking away,
trying to soften the footprints

that ran down the slope in the snow,
where they came in the night,

and carried you, still sleeping,
out to the stream, leaving us nothing

but the constant drip of walls,
a rushing sensation under our feet.