By Mark Totterdell
There’s a briny tang of rock samphire,
a slight fragrance of sweet fennel,
and I can taste the sea beet’s bitterness
in the gloss of its deep green leaves.
The clear water, shallow over pale sand,
gives rise to colours I have no words for,
somewhere maybe slightly adrift
of a gradation between greens and blues.
Among granite cobbles like hard warped eggs,
the seal is extremely dead, as dark as
the devil in a medieval woodcut,
baked thin in the slow cooker of the sun.
I approach it, the better to witness
the sightless gurning face, the stiff whiskers,
the palate dry and grey and pitted,
the whiteness of its jagged seahound teeth.
When I return from the summer sea
I will have acquired a lasting souvenir,
the heavy stench of rot that remains alive
deep in the hollows of my blenching nostrils.