Cold Water Swimming in Lyme Regis – by Audrey Molloy
RUNNER-UP, GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2025
And out again, upon the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
- John Fowles
Out again, through the flounce of dulse and tangle,
out again, through the icy bands—
sea fingers clasping calves and thighs,
sea tongues lapping frozen lips.
At twelve degrees the shock can cause your heart
to founder if you enter suddenly;
it takes a while to grow inured to coldness,
though, in less time than you might imagine,
you learn to love the selfishness of being
alone, a different thing to loneliness—
I’ve heard the mackerel singing in the reach.
I do not doubt that they will sing to me.
In, now—a gasp of breath, the air more savage
than the sea, wind needles, rain needles,
shaft-light sweeping like a search beam
through the swell. It lingers
on the Cobb, a knobbled demi-lune of boulder
pounded by the green fists of the sea.
A man once left me standing on that pier.
He left me there for years. Not really
a man, you understand, but a fiction—
one confected by a real man for his tale.
All that is past. Today these briny spangles
are my diamonds, oar-weed my bouquet.
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*Lines in italics adapted from TS Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
Image: Bevan Kay/Unsplash
This poem appeared in Island 173 in 2025. Order a print issue here and see the poem as the author intended.
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