The mouth of the thing is larger than the hovels
some of these butcherers and gawkers call a home
—this whale, stranded in its 1598 engraving
pitifully feet away
from the ale-foam combers with which the artist
signifies the sea. Nobody
nears its mouth. They run along its crest
like mountain picnickers; they dare
(it must be very weak by now) to slick their palms
along its monolithic tail, two-men-high; one
doughty venturer uses the sheath of its penis,
as sturdy for him as an aqueduct pipe,
to gain a footing, clambering its side.
But no one nears the mouth, I imagine
because these last exchanging vastnesses
of beachy air and whale lung
are too emphatic a weather
for any man to stand in long. It must
desire a breath so deeply clean,
it comes from past the margin of this page,
beyond a world defined
by gravity and the limiting laws
of thermodynamics—but no such breath
arrives, of course. Its panting lowers
into the bottom octave of oxygen need, then
fails. Whale
though it is, my book-page shrinks it down to what must be
about the size of the first finned thing
to stump itself out of the water, ever,
gasping halfway
into the deadly headiness
leading to human lives.
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