Searching for Whales

 

     Tuesday is my birthday, so yesterday I took myself on a whale watch. I have wanted to go on one since I was a child. I have always loves those beautiful giants, I read everything I could get my hand on when I was younger and at one time I wanted to be a lawyer for Greenpeace. (I assume they have their own lawyers, but as I did not pursue a career in law, I really have no idea.) Sadly, I did not get to see even one whale yesterday, but it was still an amazing trip out on the Atlantic.
     My poems today are kind of about whales; I had a very hard time finding what I was looking for, and only one of the following poems is actually about them. The other two allude to them, and in the case of Anne Pierson Wiese's poem, creates some wonderful imagery. Enjoy!

 

Vestigial Bones

jaunse tu bhagela ii toke nighalayihe
je andar rahe tohar jahaaj ke nast karihe
The remnant of hind limbs puppets an origin
play that strings baleen to terrestrial
ancestors. Occasionally whales sport hind legs —
as in Vancouver in 1949,
a harpooned humpback bore eighteen inches
of femur breaching its body wall. Disconnected
from the spine, what is their function but to rend
the book of Genesis into two? Why regard
scripture and exegesis as legs and fluke,
sure to fall away, and not eat beef or pork? Why
do I need Hindi in Hawaii as a skeletal
structure, a myth to hook my leviathan jaw?
                                                    What you run from will swallow you,
                                                       what’s inside will splinter your boat

Untitled

I want to write a poem the birds will understand
and the snakes and stones
the trees with their
               secrets and green faces
Let it enchant the dolphins and the whales
when they are courting in the middle of the ocean
Let it talk with the aborigine
who knows the moon’s a person in the sky
And should it be the last poem in the world
let it be among the first in worlds we’ve never
seen                                 where it may talk to rivers
there                                                       and animals we’ve only
seen in dreams                                              Let it walk
around in rooms                                                      where
God’s footprints have remained behind
Let it be something I’ve been unable to imagine here
There’ll be fish there             I may be riding on the
            back of one today
Will the poem be about the cheetahs and the wind
we only see when we’re in love?

Mica Schist

St. Nicholas Park in Harlem is one of few spots
on the island of Manhattan where you can stand
on terraces of rock untouched since men
with surveyor’s tools stood on them
to deliver the bad news, back in the last 
century but one: Gentlemen, here is a substance
we cannot move.  So they built around,
below and above, leaving this uneven
pleat of ground, rocks surfaced between the trees
like whales in strips of sun, stunned to find themselves
landlocked among buildings, illuminated
at night by lamp posts.   The old maples and oaks,
roots plumbing the hill as humans could not,
whisper of what’s below: more rock—more rock—more rock.
 

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