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.
