I Will Shape A Merman,
Someone Knowledgeable of the Sea

by Susan G. Dunn

“As the client uses the therapist as her object, the therapist is shaped by her desires and thereby gains an inner sense of her idiom.”

From the earliest time I can remember

I heard my mother crying,

A cry no human child could understand;

Not the cry of someone who’s been hit,

Or any other kind of physical pain,

And not the ordinary husband’s-had-an-affair,

Or I’m growing old and there is gray in my hair,

Or I’m sick and tired of these kids,

Or any sort of ordinary despair,

It was something much worse than that:

It was the cry of a water creature stranded on land

Who’s longing for the sea.

Her madness lingers in me

When she has long returned to the deep.

With the call of the siren she summons me,

Every time I get happily settled on land.

She calls my name and there I am

Sprouting scales and fins, and heading for the sea

Doing what I hated she did, then hating me doubly –

The way I hated her, and the way she hated me.

Sometimes I’ll see a photo someone’s taken of me

When I’m at ease,

And the look in my eyes is hers

And I despair –

When I’m most at ease, when I’m most ‘myself,’ I’m her.

There on my neck is a gill;

A land creature, I inherited her longing for the sea,

Something I’d never even seen,

Knowing all the feelings but none of the antecedents,

The pain for which there is no cure.

Someone needs to bring the sea to me.

She never taught me the names,

She only taught me the longing.

If I must long for something,

At least let me know what it is.

I think this is one of the best poems I've ever read.