Classic Poem

" She blows! ... She blows! ... " Of course
someone has to say it. . . . White puffs
exploding into the gale far out and fading
over wind-ivoried black-hackled ocean ...
and then the low crescent of the whale, odd-
ly rigid against the tossing water,
like the rim of a slow wheel turning — its axle
steady as a meridian under
the seas' shuddering tons ...

I came to marvel. And most
marvellous it is. Nevermind
that the naturalist aboard ship calls them
(the sea's creatures) " peleegic " .
He does his best; but at its best, even,
the language would never touch them.
They'd as soon be mispronounced
as pronounced upon in it, whose own
language (we've learned) has no ambiguity more
than light has, simply carrying
the shapes and conditions of things, the plain
unvarnished sonar of each other
and the sea and all in it. No more
could they fib (or mispronounce)
than the sun could send forth shadows.

Even now, given three cetologists
for every whale — and how many harpooneers —
the whales that are left heave up
and blow and vanish as they have forever.

I think of my father
striding in an odor of Edgeworth-and-leather
through the tame Westchester woods,
kids running to keep up, of a Sunday afternoon.

" That's wild country up there, " he'd say
of certain counties to the north
on his sales route. The word " wild, "
though for him not a seaward
but a landward term, nonetheless
signified some mysterium tremendum . And
because he was a spellbinder (not
a salesman for nothing) so
did it to us, and does still,
and comes to mind now in this
boundless forest of saltwater, wind and light. . . .

Thus it is with a dwindling of us
whose sires or grandsires were here
before the great continental wilderness withered
forever, and had felt its presence —
if only with a kind of holy dread —
whether they'd ever gazed on it or not.
Remembering them, we grow homesick
for a different distribution of things
between the human and non-human ... Amps,
hot-dogs and all, then, we churn out
past the last lobster pots and the last buoys
in the wanhope of Job's and Ishmael's
Leviathan rising from the deep.

And he rises —
he has to, to breathe. Amped at
and sub-chased every summer day
by fleets of excursioners, still
he rises. Or she: A cow finback
with her calf — concentric, flank against flank, two black
planets conjunct in the lens of the sea.
Banality itself — tourism — swirls
into nothing in the wash of a whale, its baleen
shooting a pale jade light through the waves at its forehead,
the sound of the vast vaporizing sigh
as it vanishes under a flukeprint
of imploding black water.

Then nothing for a while, " The sea's
slow miles of crumbling silence ... "
The whale-watch watches itself
rising and falling,
not only to the sea's beat but also
to the thermals and downdrafts of one-
another's attention or indifference.
Basic primatology, one could say.
An entire society in microcosm
forming itself — all styles
and degrees of consciousness — whole
pods of ratiocinating grandmothers,
mothers, fathers, kids, newlyweds,
unweds, de-weds, and what others —
one with a highland bagpipe
for hailing the humpback whale.
(Legend has it the pipes palaver
with wild things; why not, then, with those
indefatigable symphonists of the abyss?)
And of him I could say, " There's me! "
if I had the snapshot — that one
with his passport of tasselled wood,
ivory and leather, who has just skirled
" The Gairdener's Childe " from the deck house
to a monster as resolutely mute
as the mud of the sea bottom.

Palisaded thus behind drones
and chanter, he is spared, as though
part of the crew, much routine social
and moral taxonomy.

But there's one grandmother aboard,
with the haggard's eye and horsey overbite
of Brahminical Yankeedom, who
measures him with an oblique look
at once wistful and critical
as though reminded of someone
she did not trust, or wished she hadn't. —
An event, in his private polis ,
of equal magnitude to the breaching
of a twenty-ton finback calf a half-
mile off the bow. (All you can see,
in truth, is the splash, a momentary
nest of white foam in the feathering sea-race.
But the whale, says the loudspeaker,
hurled itself clear of the water.)

What grandmothers, landlocked or seafree,
need to know goes beyond costume
or occupation, straight
to the cosmic and phylogenetic: Age.
Marital status. It is still
written there in her face, something
being remembered, when the whale breached . . . .

So you see (Mr. Heisenberg)
how it is, how one mind aboard
has to factor in, beside whales
and grandmothers, an observor who,
with a certain pre-posthumous in-
delicacy, has left a wife. —
Not long since and for no reason
any fierce old Falmouth Eumenid
would listen to even out here
on a blue cusp of the planet
plumed with the breath of leviathans
where there isn't a single fixed point
in the universe and no man is at home...

Least of all this one who climbs
once again to the wheelhouse
to blow back at the wind some
jumble out of col mor ancient
and monotonous almost
as the sea itself from whose marbled
furrows the Humpback replies only
in his eponymous and promontorial shrug. . . .