He had a thick black forelock
above his brown eyes:
she called him ‘Wiggy’. He’d gone bald
long before I was conceived
in Lamorna – but on our childhood
holidays in Praa Sands or Polzeath
he still emerged from the sea
tossing back his missing fringe,
as water streamed from his brow, face,
moustache, the hairs on his chest.
My father always loved seals
I remembered yesterday, more
than fifty years after those ’50s
annual bleached transparencies –
we watched them, the seals, off Kelsey Head,
past Porth Joke: the adults inert,
speckled and fecund, draped on rocks;
their young whooshing through waves
like spermatozoa
with a luminous slipstream, and
convulsing back up the slope.
And back in Crantock, by the
dunes close to the Gannel,
protean, he came in
on the tide of last night’s dream.