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III![]()
WESTERN SLOPE
The women who come here partly give up
being women. No last names, no locks.
A spike, instead, concealed in every hairbrush.
A manâs a bear, a cub embeds his claw
in the hollow door. You wear it on a string.
Your own first snow melts gradually, old firn
riding the continental divide back to a distant
ocean. We swam there once, that water, alien blue
algae pulsing like a showgirl in the wings, it was
when you shot the worn dog that I knew you
had gone for good. Even cakes struggle to rise
at 10,000 ft. Hard angles to the atmosphere, you
say. A newborn fits a thick palm. Blood stretches
too, gasping, for its sliver of air. You wonât come
down, everything nowâs an open mouth to the wide sky and the sky unspooling cloudless
and cloudless and cloudless.
(Butâbefore I goâwasnât it us for a while? Werenât we the neon
kicking in the light? Tell me you remember the waves
bathing our necks, our small ears?)
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WHALE FALL
During sleep, a whale shuts down
only half her brain, and these days
I know how she feels. The term
is conscious breathing, if she forgets
everythingâs done for. Down into the depths
like defunct electronics, massive and gray
as a tanker full of jammed mimeographs.
Better to keep one mild eye open, stoned
as a dusk-fed cow, than to risk slow-sinking
into the pulp of the sea floor. How do we ignore
the stealth of the anglerfish? The soft force
of lungs crushed past equilibrium?
Anyone who finds the sea placid
hasnât been paying attention. A dying
whale descends, enormously,
toward special humiliation: to be jungle
gym for twitchy neon fish. Fondled
by scurvy eels, then gnawed into plankton.
Nothing left of the effortless menace,
the casual hunger of baleen swishing krillâ
all of it, gone. Instead of the sea opening
like a purse, pouty mouths peck,
gumming at our lead pleats, only to spit
and suck and spit again. The nerve. All they want
is our algae. This, for decades. Until our long
bones are finally exposed, raw, the pale frame
of a once ambitious ship, now aimless
as sugarcane wrapped by shrimp. Tonight, we pull
our sail from a dryer, flail. Where would we go
if we went? We canât recall what sleep
ever meant. Whale fall, scientists call it.
For a mammal the size of a metro bus
route, the whale does lack some imagination.
All these years, not a single fin reaching out
for beach plums. (Do you know whatâs still said
about Lâs mother, who left her kids in a mustard-
colored playpen and drove toward sunset?)
On the other hand, the whaleâs skeleton, once
picked clean, still pinches into two tiny
leg bones, just below the tail. Think of it:
what they might have become, had they
developed a taste for our dry airâor
had they not turned back. Their bulky city,
vast hospitals specializing in joint repair.
Instead, woozy bags of organs, little more.
Even with those hearts big as rental cars.
But the bit of fur, the milk remind us
to Windex the lens before we aim
and shoot. If we look close enough we see
ourselves ticking along to magnetic north:
this way for food, this for sex,
how to enter a current, and to escape,
the way shade quivers when orcas circle
a calf. We remember how to begin
again, day after day, letting others moor
or latch as the ticking clock requires. For us, life
drags on for two hundred years. Half-breathing,
half-awake, floating or swimmingâweâre not
sure which: but push out/drag in, through
the blowhole flexed as a starved nostril,
weâre at the surface for a flash, foaming
plum, plum or was that from our mouth,
beak, pineal gland, appendix, the flukes
we canât shake? We canât say which, or where
we are, or when we split into legsâdidnât we
live here once?âbut which direction
to summer, unthinking lung? Lung, itâs been so long
since weâve dragged against a new shore,
carved a sandbar into a question mark.
Muscled along the freshwater beaverâs tail,
well out of our own water. Just listen to all
the claws out there, clicking along
unfamiliar strands. Breathing, any way
they can, as if real sleep might arrive
with the next wave.
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IF IMAGINATION AND MEMORY MET UNEXPECTEDLY, ONE LAST TIME
it would be this moment, the dark slow mess
of one body unpiling toward another in sleep, the longing of two
waves reeling in queasy parallel. Mostly itâs like you
never rested here, this body, your head never heavy
as sorrow, as troubled bone, neve...
