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
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?
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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