I suppose it’s too late to be a sea otter?
To be in some otter place, some sandy inlet
where I may lie back and play a trout harmonica,
swaddled in ticklish kelp and buoyant insouciance?
I suppose it’s too late to be a god disguised as a sea otter?
To be in some otter time, some golden age
where I might heft my stone abalone-cracker,
teaching men to weigh wisdom heavier than pelts?
I suppose it’s too late to be otter than myself?
I usually love writing ‘How To’ instructional poems, they can be a great excuse to get a bit surreal. I’m sure a ‘How To Be An Otter’ poem would have gone to a happy place, had I not clicked on an otter anatomy site in my research and been indelibly scarred by pictures of dissected sea otters killed by ingesting crude oil from a tanker disaster. I am not giving you that link, people. It also made for a slightly angry poem.
How To Care For An Oiled Otter
First, put aside any notion that otters swim,
agile and unblemished, through an ocean
pure as tempered starlight.
Pollute your vision with plastic frags,
run-off, effluent, and the crude suppuration of oil
bleeding out of smashed tankers,
venting from mismanaged seabed hellmouths.
Don’t like it? Suck it up.
Tar patties will clog your sentiment until
finally it sinks in – your buoyancy
is fatally compromised.
Now you are ready for the work.
Dip-net for speed, Kevlar-gloved
in case they break open caustic-ravaged mouths
to bite, in case they have some vestige of sight.
Use the stuff-sack, the holding-box, the heat-lamp,
and wash, wash, wash, wash, wash.
Soft water makes a difference. So can you.
For two hours each otter, this is all you do,
care for something that can never
thank you or profit you or forgive
our species rendering them collateral.
And if their pelage softens and restores its guard,
if their temperature ceases its giddy rollercoaster,
if they have guts enough left unblistered to digest clams you shuck,
if you have used masks and blinds and feeding chutes
so after all of that they are still sufficiently wild,
release them, and wait for the next time.
Today, we otter off-pist
e, off-prompt, and a little bit off-the-cuff. For today is the birthday of a certain Nicola Sky Hawkins, and she needs an otter.
For inspiration, I have looked to ‘New Girl’ actress, the ultimate manic pixie girl herself – Zooey Deschanel. Not content with having her own bonkers name, last August she named her new-born daughter ‘Elsie Otter’. But I like that. I like that, when quizzed, she said her choice was based on otters being “playful and smart”. These are good qualities to wish for a daughter, and I salute her, just as I salute Sky.
Celebrity Baby Names
Celebrity parents, curb your whimsy
when burdening your child with names
they must struggle to fit, or else outrun.
The Apple may not fall far from the Paltrow,
she may yet fulfil all that glossy promise,
but fruit does go bad. Look at Peaches.
Better to slip in a middle name like a sixpence
under a pillow, a good fairy’s cribside blessing,
a seed that may be revealed to the light, but later,
at the needful point of greatest growth.
A Nicola could punk it up to high-kickin’ Nikki,
but what if her mum had tucked away a token
reading ‘Sky’? She could kiss it and unfold,
become a thousand times herself more blue
and beautiful when the storms tear through.
So this parting thought for tiny Elsie Deschanel,
one day loving the granny chic her name suggests,
but underneath coy necklines, playful and smart,
always knowing she is Otter at her heart.
Challenged by NaPoWriMo to use ten words from some hypothetical specialist dictionary I am meant to have lying around the place, I sniffed miffily and went online to play with Scrabble dictionaries. Prepare yourself for a short, sharp burst of alliteration. Ooooooooo…..
(Also, this video of a diving sea otter)
Observe the otter oscillate
and over-roll, obsidian-wet,
ogive-headed oceanaut,
oligarch of oysterbeds ornate
as origami from the Orient,
his ogee-outline oiltight,
ombré, opalescent.
One of the lovely, yet slightly unnerving things about writing obsessively about otters is that people pretty soon start sending you little-known factoids about otters and otter-related subjects. For example, did you know that my great, great, great grandmother by marriage came from Ottery St Mary in Devon? Of course you didn’t.
Anyhoo, today’s prompt was an interesting one about imagining place, so I decided to write an imagined Ottery, using as my template one of the most famous poems by the town’s most famous son, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Read the original Kubla Khan here)
(The Tumbling Weir is a real thing).
In Ottery did otter-kind
A wat’ry romping-ground decree
Where through a cunning aperture
Slid the silver’d river pure
Down through the Tumbling Weir.
So culverted and dug about
The river wound both in and out
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where spawned many a succulent-tasting frog
And here were fish untouched by heron’s bills
Plumply fall’n in paws of bitch and dog.
But oh! those muddy chutes that slanted
Down the green banks athwart the tender willows!
A joyous place! as playful and enchanted
As e’er beneath the Hydra’s stars was vaulted
By otter leaping in a dwindling oxbow!
And down these mudchutes, with ceaseless squeals of pleasure
As if their merriment could last forever
The otter brethren happily did slide
Amid whose swift free-spirited glide
The plashy mud did bounce like blessed rain
And all who slid cried out ‘again! again!’
And waiting at the bottom, cool as ever
Ran the deep and sacred Otter River.
Five miles meandering with mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran
Diverted from the settlements of man
By otters navigating to the ocean.
Hark, ‘cross the waters that they float upon!
Ancestral otters prophesying fun!
There was no shadow in the land of play
Cavorting on the midway of the flow,
All that could be heard by night or day
Were the otters paddling to and fro.
It was a miracle of harmony,
A place where creatures lived so cheerfully!
An otter with a mandolin
I saw once in a waking dream
It was an Amazonian
And on its mandolin it strummed
Singing of distant Andes.
Could I revive within me
Its simplicity and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That by digging deep and long,
I would build that romping-place
Those water-slides! That Tumbling Weir!
And all who came should be of cheer,
And all should cry, hooray! hear! hear!
This splashing lark, these waters clear!
Encircle him most utterly
And keep him close unto your hearts
For he has travelled off the charts
To bring us all to Otterly.
Halfway through my self-imposed month of otter-themed NaPoWriMo poems! Time for something ridiculous, I feel.
Double the otter is double the fun,
if you could have two, why would you have one?
Double again so your otters are four,
That’s eighty sharp claws on your new parquet floor.
But four is no party, let’s make it eight,
And if you consider their full-grown weight,
That’s almost three hundred and sixty kilos
of otter, pissing all over the dado.
Imagine the stench when you get to sixteen!
Never again will the hearth rug be clean,
The destruction that one thirty-two-otter raft
Can wreak on a free-standing cast-iron bath!
When the sum of the blighters hits sixty-four,
Flee from the mayhem and move in next door!
Just pray that they don’t take up playing bassoon,
This one-hundred-twenty-eight-otter commune,
You may be afflicted by pains existential
If otters keep breeding at rates exponential.
Honestly folks, two straight weeks of otters is difficult enough, but the NaPoWriMo prompt today featured a very spurious poetic form with many rules about rhyme and repetition that are just too dull to explain to you right now. Suffice it to say, I have done it with 43 minutes of the day to spare, so if I’ve got the rules wrong then tough!
It’s inspired by the fur of the sea otter, which is the thickest on Earth, and which was the reason they were nearly hunted to extinction. Try this little video for more info. The picture for todays post is the only kind of otter hat people should buy nowadays.
Fur Trade
Diving, they are comet-tailed, a plunging silver fizz
of bubbles as the pressure wrings them sleek as fish,
flattening the under-fur that crowds a million to the inch.
One pelagic pelt could mean good silver to the thief
adept to plunge the knife in, to strip the sheath
from vibrissae to tail-tip, so some millionaire can swish
fur-hatted, fizz-swilling through crowds that enviously seethe
Oh! to wear an otter! it is our dearest aim and wish!
Tasked by NaPoWriMo with writing inspired by a fortune cookie, I delved into an online repository of those aphorisms and found this implausibly long, but entirely appropriate fortune – “Hidden in a valley beside an open stream- This will be the type of place where you will find your dream.” It really does sound like it was written with otters in mind, doesn’t it?
It reminded me of a story my lovely friend Lil told me. She was walking her dog on the banks of the Tyne river behind her house, when she saw an otter floating on its back in the water, for all the world looking like it was daydreaming. Lil was convinced she was imagining her future mate and family, and behold! some months later she saw the otter again, this time playing with two pups. They were on the opposite bank, and had found a red ball, which they were rolling to one another. So this is a poem for Lilly’s Dreaming Otter.
she dandles herself in the current
with her drowsy webfoot flutter
all whiskery contentment
she is as sweet as doing nothing
upriver and down, fishing and floating
balance in her belly and her heart
she watches the wind sift the sky
into its several selves
nested clouds, ribbons, tufts
some dark enough to cry themselves
back into the ever-slippery sheets
of her water-bed, this river
where she is dreaming up
a spry dog to share it
a glinty rogue, a playmate
they will make a home
where the river bank is scalloped
with beaches of pelt-brown sand
they will make pups, a proper romp
nose to tail to nose to tail
they will make a carousel of love
It may surprise you to know that I don’t have textbooks about aquatic mammals lying around the house, so I was hard-pushed to find an index from which to write today’s NaPoWriMo poem. Fortunately, Newcastle Library had a magnificently arcane handbook for commercial fishermen, from which I gleaned these wise words…(which should have been heeded by this fishing boat in Shetland)
The Trawlerman’s Handbook, p.89-91
Otter Boards divert water flow into your nets.
Keep your Otter Boards well-adjusted, don’t spoil them.
They are boards for water, but not waterboards.
Please do not waterboard your otter,
they can hold their breath for four minutes,
at best you will merely annoy them, and then
you must quickly calculate the Angle Of Attack,
which is the distance between your Otter Board
and the Direction of Flow calculated in degrees,
multiplied by your otter’s annoyance.
If your otter shows a V-shape when sideways on,
it is a British otter and remembers Agincourt.
If a piratical otter boards your vessel, repel!
Protect your salmon! Otters may become unstable
in the presence of large quantities of salmon.
Stop your otter tilting by shortening, or lengthening
their upper and lower backstrops accordingly.
Careful of your fingers!! They may strop back!
Always keeping in mind that a little tilt
is a good thing for some bottom conditions.
If you see your otter heeling inwards, and then
heeling outwards, he has begun his ritual dance
of Saluting The Salmon, and your catch is lost to you.
You should have repelled him when I told you to.
Today we are asked to describe a place, then top off our description with a philiosphical bon mot or two. Fab. Of course, I immediately rifled my memories for sunlit riverbanks, demanded my imagination populate the scene with otters. But then I remembered a place I had already promised myself I would write about this month, a garden I pass every day, a garden blessed with… an ornamental otter!!!!!!!
This simple bench, its back against
the pebble dash, is a trap for sun
on which I sit, patient as bait.
In the eaves a host of starlings
whirr, click and chuff, discordant
choristers for a strange faith.
A road may be inferred beyond
the horizon of the garden wall,
from the odd passages of cars.
In their wake a sucking, slapping
almost entirely irregular boom.
I believe it is high tide. Yes, yes,
the bells of St Hilda’s nod agreement,
A stray beam of April illuminates
the pocket lawn, a square-cut emerald,
whose margins are as dense with foliage
and critters as a mediaeval Gospel.
Gargoyles and dwarves wink plastic eyes
under fancifully unscrolling hosters.
Amid bluebells, a goose gawps upwards,
its white throat a column of greed,
twice the height of the flamingo.
And at my feet, resplendent,
scampers the piece de resistance –
the moulded-resin, stone-effect,
not-quite-life-sized otter, apogee
of all that is good and pleasing.
It is not to have what you want,
but to want what you have,
that is true happiness.
Kirsten Luckins 