Rose Kelleher
Sea Monster
Cold doesn't sneak in like a parasite
and multiply, it's something you become:
a single-minded organism, numb
and numbskulled, chattering alingually.
What a wiggly two-headed trilobite
we made with all our arms and legs that night
in someone's foyer; dragged up from the sea,
bedraggled, at the end of our one rope.
Wrapped in a single coat, we shared a skin,
a bottle, a kiss, blue-lipped and Cambrian,
our tiny brain too primitive to cope
with any concept so Darwinian
as hope; just body heat and you and me.
Dumb animal, and near-extinct, but then
there are worse things to be.
