By May Thomson
The aliens arrived at bathtime,
Whirring through the soft, black evening
In the starry galley we never spied.
You, seeing everything, would point:
There – and again there!
Then your brow would ripple – skull plates
In sudden, continental drift,
Listening carefully for something…
Catching a blurry, infrasonic word.
Little Heather, still with her aureate curls,
Would start to pout and redden,
And when a lone tear plashed into the spume,
Mother would snap your name,
And you’d parcel the bairnie into her towel,
Admitting there were no aliens at all.
When you refilled the porcelain tub,
You’d tell us of your days as a shimmering girlish thing,
With glassy scales and webbed fingers.
Of the utterly clear sea and its glowing beings.
How you’d cover miles and miles
In the thrashing waters off the Moray coast,
Before you traded it all in for something new,
Hauling yourself up and across the wet sand and,
With a mouthful of seawater, deciding to be a father.
You were so big, in the fullest sense.
I don’t know how you managed
To squeeze into that signed box.
Even now, some part of us
Is stuck in that bathtub –
In our hazy dreams, we still see you,
Eyes gleaming, chest rising.
We will wait up for you to reemerge,
To give up on your cruellest trick yet –
For your wife to scold you
Into revealing your hiding place.