Three lines long, and the poem has already tripped you up in the title. "Pinnipedestrian" is a stitched-together word. "Pinniped" is the scientific name for the group of animals that includes seals, and it comes from Latin roots meaning roughly "fin-footed." "Pedestrian" means someone on foot, and, in everyday speech, something dull. The two halves overlap on "ped," foot, so the word doesn't just join a seal to a walker. It makes them share a foot. The pun also does some quiet work: it takes the most ordinary human act, walking, and makes it sound strange and a little comic.
The poem itself is a single sentence: "Kin to the seal, / I walk beyond the version / of the sea I am." It opens with a claim of family and offers no evidence. The seal is a good choice of relative. It is an animal at ease in water and clumsy on land, so it lives at a border between elements, and the speaker takes on that borderline quality. The sentence then turns to its stranger phrase, "the sea I am." Human bodies are mostly water, so the line is half literal, but the grammar goes further. The speaker is not simply made of sea; the speaker *is* sea, in one particular form.
That form is called a "version," and the word is the poem's most interesting choice. We usually use it for translations, drafts and editions, things that can be revised or exist in several copies. Calling oneself a version of the sea suggests that the sea has other versions, and that the seal may be one of them. Seen this way, "kin" is more than a sentimental word. Speaker and seal are two renderings of the same source. The verb "walk beyond" can be read in two ways, and the poem doesn't choose. It could be spatial: the speaker leaves the water behind and goes onto land, past the shoreline of the self. It could also be a matter of growth: the speaker outgrows a particular way of being. Either way, the walking carries the water with it, because you can only go beyond something you have been inside.
The construction is spare, and the sound does more than first appears. There is no end rhyme and no regular meter. The syllable count runs four, seven, five, which is close to the five-seven-five of a haiku, but the opening line is a beat short. The shape is therefore recognisable without being a copy. It begins small, stretches into the long middle line, then contracts again. The middle line is also the one that "walks beyond," so it is physically the longest stride on the page. The line break after "version" works the same way. The reader is left hanging on that abstract word for a moment before "the sea" arrives and opens the sentence out.
Look at "seal" and "sea," too. The same vowel runs through both, and "sea" sits inside "seal" with only the final letter removed. The sea is almost hidden in the animal's name, just as it is hidden in the speaker. The two "I"s, one opening line two and one closing line three, enclose the speaker's claims, so the human voice is fenced in by the water imagery on both sides. The poem ends on "am," a verb of plain existence with nothing after it. After all the shifting between seal, version and sea, the last word is the speaker simply being.
What makes the poem significant is how little it needs to say this much. It never argues that humans belong to the wider natural world or that our bodies carry an older, watery history. It lets a coined word and a slightly odd grammatical turn make the case. The reader's reward is an unexpected sense of self: you are not a separate creature taking a walk, but a version of something much larger, and a pedestrian on a pavement is also a seal-cousin out of the water. The humour of the title keeps that idea from sounding grand, and the seriousness of the three lines keeps the joke from being only a joke.