Day 718: Elegy for a Whale

 

 

'Voyager, chief of the pelagic world,/you brought with you the myth/of another country, dimly remembered...'

 

Yesterday, nature brought a tragedy to our shores - a pod of pilot whales, thirteen in total, beached themselves here in Donegal and unfortunately, at the time I write this, five have died and others beached again, despite rescuers' best attempts to refloat them. It's such a cruel and mysterious aspect of nature and such a waste. What is it about beached whales that evokes such tragedy and lament in us? Maybe this poem can explain it; it chronicles the life of one similarly fated whale, capturing the grace and appeal of these beautiful creatures therein.

The Wellfleet Whale - Stanley Kunitz

 

You have your language too,

an eerie medley of clicks

and hoots and trills,

location-notes and love calls,

whistles and grunts. Occasionally,

it’s like furniture being smashed,

or the creaking of a mossy door,

sounds that all melt into a liquid

song with endless variations,

as if to compensate

for the vast loneliness of the sea.

Sometimes a disembodied voice

breaks in, as if from distant reefs,

and it’s as much as one can bear

to listen to its long mournful cry,

a sorrow without name, both more

and less than human. It drags

across the ear like a record

running down.

No wind. No waves. No clouds.

Only the whisper of the tide,

as it withdrew, stroking the shore,

a lazy drift of gulls overhead,

and tiny points of light

bubbling in the channel.

It was the tag-end of summer.

From the harbor’s mouth

you coasted into sight,

flashing news of your advent,

the crescent of your dorsal fin

clipping the diamonded surface.

We cheered at the sign of your greatness

when the black barrel of your head

erupted, ramming the water,

and you flowered for us

in the jet of your spouting.

All the afternoon you swam

tirelessly round the bay,

with such an easy motion,

the slightest downbeat of your tail,

an almost imperceptible

undulation of your flippers,

you seemed like something poured,

not driven; you seemed

to marry grace with power.

And when you bounded into air,

slapping your flukes,

we thrilled to look upon

pure energy incarnate

as nobility of form.

You seemed to ask of us

not sympathy, or love,

or understanding,

but awe and wonder.

That night we watched you

swimming in the moon.

Your back was molten silver.

We guessed your silent passage

by the phosphorescence in your wake.

At dawn we found you stranded on the rocks.

There came a boy and a man

and yet other men running, and two

schoolgirls in yellow halters

and a housewife bedecked

with curlers, and whole families in beach

buggies with assorted yelping dogs.

The tide was almost out.

We could walk around you,

as you heaved deeper into the shoal,

crushed by your own weight,

collapsing into yourself,

your flippers and your flukes

quivering, your blowhole

spasmodically bubbling, roaring.

In the pit of your gaping mouth

You bared your fringe work of baleen,

a thicket of horned bristles.

When the Curator of Mammals

arrived from Boston

to take samples of your blood

you were already oozing from below.

Somebody had carved his initials

in your flank. Hunters of souvenirs

had peeled off strips of your skin,

a membrane thin as paper.

You were blistered and cracked by the sun.

The gulls had been picking at you.

The sound you made was a hoarse and fitful bleating.

What drew us to the magnet of your dying?

You made a bond between us,

the keepers of the nightfall watch,

who gathered in a ring around you,

boozing in the bonfire light.

Toward dawn we shared with you

your hour of desolation,

the huge lingering passion

of your unearthly outcry,

as you swung your blind head

toward us and laboriously opened

a bloodshot, glistening eye,

in which we swam with terror and recognition.

Voyager, chief of the pelagic world,

you brought with you the myth

of another country, dimly remembered,

where flying reptiles

lumbered over the steaming marshes

and trumpeting thunder lizards

wallowed in the reeds.

While empires rose and fell on land,

your nation breasted the open main,

rocked in the consoling rhythm

of the tides. Which ancestor first plunged

head-down through zones of colored twilight

to scour the bottom of the dark?

You ranged the North Atlantic track

from Port-of-Spain to Baffin Bay,

edging between the ice-floes

through the fat of summer,

lob-tailing, breaching, sounding,

grazing in the pastures of the sea

on krill-rich orange plankton

crackling with life.

You prowled down the continental shelf,

guided by the sun and stars

and the taste of alluvial silt

on your way southward

to the warm lagoons,

the tropic of desire,

where the lovers lie belly to belly

in the rub and nuzzle of their sporting;

and you turned, like a god in exile,

out of your wide primeval element,

delivered to the mercy of time.

Master of the whale-roads,

let the white wings of the gulls

spread out their cover.

You have become like us,

disgraced and mortal.