With The Living

Among them
New Bedford Whaling Museum

With The Living

What is fidelity?  To what

does it hold?  The point

of departure, or the turning road

that is departure and absence

and the halfway home?  What we are

and what we were once

are far estranged.

                                                Wendell Berry

                                                The Dance

I: a small whale

The juvenile female humpback came through to the cove

almost unnoticed and maybe it had been

a foggy morning, or maybe the last of the season’s

snow was falling into the water, a bitter squall.

So by the time she was seen she was dead

and stranded and belly up and the gulls

were making their day of the castle and bastion

of her fins and lip.  And by the time the first

of the crew gets there by road or boat the tide

is maybe ready to turn again and she’ll float some

though the beach stones hold her have her good

as any hook for the next few hours.  It’s a leap

I know, because I’m happier now than I’ve ever

been, but time was I’d’ve liked to

know what’s under all that baleen: were her brief

scenes in this water anything at all like mine,

was she rocked and sounded in the dark by marauders

she’d never be able to name and wouldn’t, being

bullied and pushed noway.  I’d like to be reincarnated

in her some of those days when she was

purpose strong and some days in this very cove

where the snow is still melting in places

this late April, in the woods not far from shore. 

II: saying it isn't living it

I’d like to try to find my way back better

than I was when I left and less used up.  We all

know coming home after all these decades

away is almost a betrayal and maybe our brief

summer of touching her skittish lips (she's dead, 

she lets us) has gaffed anew those old broke-healed-broke-

healed bones that taught me, finally, the water

I was born in would kill me after all, unless

I breached it, unless I found some rounded mouth

to kiss me different and make me bold enough to hold

my lungs in my own two hands and say ok yes

I agree to live it, but not with you.  Isn’t it ironic it’s life
that keeps her sunk under all that salt and to breathe in all that

krilly water she has to make herself weightless

and once she leaves it she’d done for?  Did she,

swimming along the gullies and plains, the rock

ridges and beat up boat carcasses, wonder

what it was that began to make her start

dying, or did she graze the migration of shrimps

like the rest of them and break away from her own

fellows to feel her own gratuity?  But still

I’m not convinced it’s just the way of life to be in

some kind of trouble unseen

and only until after the silence of being

gone is it mistook for acquiescence

and nobody came to save her or intervene.  Listen,

what choice does she, breathing now

her own defeat, have?  Maybe the greatest

wave we ride is the one that takes us home

because we know the land we're dying on being
after knowing that holding on to those whose only goal

is to harpoon the hell out of us once we

surface, those who, coming in to sieve

our blubber and mock our falling up to
the surface are really after marauding and mocking

their own, they're just too stupid to know it, too fucked
to know they're fucked.  It's true, once the rope’s

run out, dipped in the wet and lit and evaporating wax,
the dark will be lowered like a boat in the water.

And, because we're drowning anyway we can't
know or even care about the motive of the captain,

he's got the oar extended.  Maybe to lift us
to cargo or bash us through.  Who knows.   Still,

we reach.  We reach and reach.  Until we don't.
And then, well then, aren't we free?