The Dolphin

It’s not the shadow  of a cloud or the shape of a shoal
so I ask what’s out there -
as if the answer was concealed within myself.

Yes I ask myself what it might be
and after a while it is the swimmer that replies,
daring to show its deft muscle and delphic  arc.

Next I start counting with my own heartbeat
and discover that every ten seconds this swimmer surfaces
like a bowsaw against the sea’s green grain,
and that every ten seconds it leaps eastward
off the rocks of Cyrn y locs  towards The Irongate.

There are fathoms between us
but we are familiars. I am sure of that.
Because I have walked where it dives now
and I have swam where it is swimming
through the grey wall slow to fall in rubble,
through the white wall it has mined yet flies above.

And every ten seconds this dark dauphin
of the gwters and the gwlis and the grykes,
every ten seconds the Gulf Stream leopard
hurtles out of the salt thickets
and from where I stand on the cliff’s dais
I can feel it coming, I can feel it coming,
so that the sea is changed and will never be the same.