Margaret Coombs (Portfolio site: margaretcoombs.com)

“Tingmissartoq and Sea Woman”

 

Baptized by my manufacturer

as the Lockheed Model 8 Sirius, 

they made me flashy with a black 

wooden fuselage, red wings,

 

silver pontoons, and the latest

in instrumentation. When I

splashed into a dark fjord

in Greenland, children

 

ran to the shore, shouting

Tingmissartoq! The hissing

syllables dripped like rain. 

Underneath me in the water 

 

I felt a presence—

Sea Woman, who loosened 

her hair antagonistically, as if 

to ensnare and entangle me.

 

To evade her tresses, every day 

I became more birdlike, circling  

and soaring, buzzing 

the foaming waves in the bay. 

 

One day she answered back

with a laugh and a beckoning 

curl. Tingmissartoq. An Inuit 

teen painted the name on me,

 

aligning the letters to Sea Woman,

not my body. The aviators 

grumbled at his mistake but I 

tingled at my new orientation. 

 

I delighted in her depths, her 

intelligence, the life she 

designed out of eons and ages, 

wind and ice. Sea Woman, 

 

whenever Tingmissartoq 

lifts off from your surface, 

he dazzles, he dances

emboldened by your touch.

 

*In 1933,  Charles and Anne Lindbergh flew to Greenland, where they named their plane Tingmissartoq.