Night-flying moths follow your curve across the sea towards the white sheets, the clean white sheets, prepared for you at the castle.

Unseen except by black herring shoals, you summon a blue whale, become a remora hitching a ride.

Buoyed by cold ocean, ignoring flirtations of brine and current,  you lazily tail-tease a squid into your tooth-stacked mouth.

A crick of unease then as the whale founders in the shallows, your gaze forced up to where wave-folds fraction the moon, stars and mariners’ ship-lights all the same spangles to your fish sense.

An interlude: palp of gill-stress, waiting for the rain out of the high clouds to haul your salt-muscled belly ashore. Slow progress finding your way, handholds web-to-rock, to moored boats, to rigging, all in a purpose to feel the meaning of man in his tools, your mind drenched  in a liquid fairy tale where love is the colour of a prince on a faraway, moon-troubled shore.

There he is, in his black boots, running back to his father’s castle, a dozen servants to prepare him – enough he thinks (was born to think) – to master you. Gill suck. Then a final spill of rain as you turn your thick neck towards the ladder rising up the wall to the prince’s bed-chamber. Coiling up in its lengths, unwinding your tail, you wet each eye with spit so your first sight of him is true.