Between the imaginary iceberg and the skeletal whale
is the stuffed and mounted mermaid in her case,
the crudely-stitched seam between skin and scale
so unlike Herbert Draper’ s siren dreams, loose
on the swelling tide, part virgin and part harpy.
Her post-mortem hair and her terrible face
look more like P. T. Barnum’ s Freak of Feejee,
piscene and wordless, trapped in the net of a stare.
She has the head and shrivelled tits of a monkey,
the green glass eyes of a porcelain doll, a pair
of praying-mantis hands, and fishy lips
open to reveal her sea-caved mouth, her rare
ivory mermaid-teeth. Children breathe and rap
on the glass to make her move. In her fixity
she’ s as far as can be from the selkie who slips
her wet pelt on the beaches of Orkney
and walks as a woman, pupils widened in light,
discarding the stuffed sack of her body.
Without hearing, or touch, or taste, or smell, or sight
she echoes the numb roll of the whale
in a sea congealed with cold, when it was thought
no beast could be a nerveless as the whale.