“A Mermaid,” oil on canvas, by John William Waterhouse, 1900.
When she can’t sleep, she plays solitaire
(though there’s often an opponent
sitting at the wooden chair across from her).
In high winds, this floor
of the house sways like a boat.
Nothing is as merciless as the sea.
If a bird leaves the roof at the right angle
the reflection looks like a person
jumping off.
And what are these floorboards
if not planks licked with salt?
Skirts that rustle
when she sits down on the bed
but would be quiet if they
were filled with water.
In the morning, she hears a church bell
ring out over bone-tired hills,
and stops to navigate
by its pulsing heart. Against her
closed eyes an afterimage
of startled fish
changing direction.
You can keep a ship’s log
anywhere you know,
begin to trace it
with your index finger
on your palm,
or make it into a rhyme
to store in your head.
We all have a slow wheel
that we can spin,
weathered to fit our hands,
the blank
page of morning that we turn
and turn again,
a crisp record of our progress
we pretend to keep.
There are a thousand stars
in the skies over Amherst.
Some evenings, it seems
that someone has tucked her away
here,
like a stocking in a drawer.
People write a story into which they insert
their own sad protagonist,
dressed in their clothes.
People on the street below
gather around
a dark shape on the sidewalk.
They see what they want to see—
a cat killed by a car
instead of what it really is:
the shadow of a mermaid.
At the fragile edge of dusk,
the world
dissolves up to the corners
of the house. The north star,
an impossible eye
in a dark countenance, watches her
kneel beside the bed to entrust
her sleeping soul to God.
There are a thousand skies
under which to be alone.
Carmen Fought is a Professor of Linguistics who teaches at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Driftwood 2024 Anthology, Gyroscope Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Anacapa Review, Kestrel, and elsewhere.
