Writer’s Weir: Baula

Published 8:01 am Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Stars, waves, air made of salt,

the bulk of her rising

from the sea,

the shape of this night—

eggs, nest, leatherback.

A lumbering, a heaving,

a ridged body labors,

its enormity itself a mystery,

made as it is

of soft-bodied creatures—

jellyfish, tunicates, squid.

She has mated offshore

with a male or maybe three

who will never take leave

of the sea, never find land

as she does, never excavate

a womb of sand.

Above the tide line, a nesting

chamber where eggs come

in a stream, on a beach where

later a boy will ask, worried,

won’t they find their mama again

and a mama won’t know

what to say.

How to explain this letting go,

the ecology of the r-selected

species built for broadcasting

offspring, an insurance

of numbers to guarantee

lineage.

How to understand

the reptilian brain,

elemental, metallic, blood

and bone, cueing to instinct,

which means leave-taking—

no child-rearing here.

And still the tamping of sand,

back-filling, disguising the nest,

deliberate as anything—

it looks like affection, it does.

Prompting a father, hours later

to pause, shoes in hand,

staring at his sleeping children

the way she packed the sand

she was literally tucking her babies in

you could see it in a cupped flipper.

• Aleria Jensen is the featured writer for the spring 2016 issue of Tidal Echoes.