Manatee

Just the same, the poem of the manatee
will not go away. It keeps inshore,
keeps disappearing in the tale
of sightings, encounters, caresses;
massive habitué, mortally
ready to be flesh, of the lull
and shallows of your Floridian sea-board.

There, daylight balances
in a cup, the manatee imperturbably
forages the river-mouth. Sweet passes
to salt, the measure of sun
and distance to the skim of water,
weed loses count and clouds
the pools, straggling herds-wide;

whose people, sinking slowly
to pasture, improbable as Zeppelins,
have never been told what happened
to Steller's sea-cow, two centuries
and an ocean away. Nor asked, what
survives here? Things that lie still,
things that have cover, the armour-clads,

what man lets be. This surely, this
interval, no-man's-land, weed-crammed
sand-bottoms, weed-streams, weed-seasons
and the calm exemplary nation
of lump-faced eaters of weed
browsing, suckling, circling
weedways of visionary twilight.

Poem, boulders that drift,
submarine idyll, silences
incomprehensibly large!
Here come the divers, bubbling
their little quick land-words, working
the frog-feet they learned to reach you,
juggling weed-trails and historic emotions;

they goggle – the mermaid bears
into focus. The death of sailormen's
an undesigning body, after all:
huge-pored, hare-lipped and bald,
the stare one weed-thought, the hide
an aged, impervious tolerance
of weed, hide, hands ...

What did they see in her, those press-ganged
years of pemmican and the lash?
Fresh meat in parting foam –
good men jumped in and the wake
unrolled to tent their feast;
man-eater for sure. The creature's
researched now, re-conceived,

civilised and cast in a cattle-part
for our old crepuscular dream
of man and the peaceable monsters.
Only, men hardly learn
undersea purposes, and course
circuits of deluded will
dandling the enigma; to end

with utility, Midlands farmers
in a Stubbs, dwarfed by their stud
uncaring bulls. The manatee
ignore curious glass,
move against the little limbs
assured of their region, torpidly
hand-feed, and never think to bite.