Hans Ostrom’s “Sea Monster” gives voice to a strange, weary creature moving beneath the surface of a cove. It describes itself with grim detachment: sharp shapes, clear contrasts, a “dumb back,” and “ridiculous flippers.” The water feels as heavy and constant as its own body. The mood is solitary, melancholic, and resigned. The monster imagines its own death: sinking to the ancient mud, one eye buried in muck while the other still stares at the dark water. It pictures a long-suppressed moan rising into a scream, only to be smothered by the sea—and a passing bird mistakes the sound for a fish before flying away. By the end, the speaker seems less like a monster and more like a lonely, overwhelmed mind drowning in sorrow. The final line turns the creature into a vast, submerged landscape of grief.
Sea Monster — Summary
I drift beneath a grammar of sharply etched shapes and clear contrasts. Eddies dance as if to mock my dumb back as I pass under a cove’s calm surface.
Sometimes a seabird’s shriek thuds through thick water. I feel forever dark weight of water. It’s as present to me as my own body as I push
through it with ridiculous flippers. One day I will just stop and drop to ancient mud; clouds of mud will mushroom out about me, swirl,
disappear on currents. I'll roll on one side with one eye buried in muck and one still staring at black water mottled with insinuations of light.
A sound will grow in me, rise out of my mute years, build into a moaning like a sunken ship’s crushed hull, then race into a scream smothered
by seawater, seaweed. A white bird will cock its head, thinking it’s heard a fish, dip to the surface, and seeing nothing, sail back to bright bluffs. I will have become
an inundated continent of grief, overwhelmed.