POEMS From Interpretive Work
From Ice-Blink
Uncollected
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Right Whale: Death as Spectacle
The bulk ashore not yet fetid, but surely
close. Tire tracks deep in sand where tractors
tried to haul it up, chain around the tail stock.
There was a steady stream of visitors, for who
wouldn't want to see or didn't feel obligation
to stand near and take measure of
a right whale on the beach? Still, I don't know
that it was anything good in me, anything kind
or gentle that made me think my grandmother,
visiting, would want to be there. Oh small god
of probity, little imp of familial needling, which
of you spoke that day? We trudged into the hard wind
toward the yellow flags staked around books
of flensed blubber. Biologists clambered up
the tall hill of its ribs and bonnet, measuring,
cutting in, digging for cause. I was young. Bulk
and death fascinated me, but my grandmother
had already put behind her tonnages of grief.
The colors of the flesh—black skin, white fat, red meat—glinted
wet in the late fall light. Baleen leaned from its jaw,
nodding to wind, waves, footsteps over the body.
How beautiful, I thought. How lucky. How sad.
This was spectacle and, too, a reprobation of spectacle.
Her face was composed in the soft blank of looking.
Really, I have no idea what she thought.
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