A Proper Burial:
The Whale.
for Ginny and her husband Dan
for Ginny and her husband Dan
A canoe made of horse ribs tipped over in the pasture.
Prairie flowers took it for a meetinghouse.
they grow there with a vengeance.
James Galvin
The Measure of the Year
The whale settles that very same way: she takes
her last how many gallons of air? and goes down
slow to the waltz. Blow-hole closed, it's something else
implodes but just so that life around her keeps
going, it kisses her quick as she drifts
and lifts and sinks with the tip of this blue globe.
On the surface somewhere a blizzard sits in the lips
and fingers of lost children. On the surface a drought
sits in the ribs of crows bent in famine. On the surface, somewhere,
the sun is nothing but rising or falling in the nonchalant
lives that go from end of day to end
of day without knowing or thinking to know that something
large like this slips through the veils of bluing
dark, beneath icebergs or kelp beds, beneath
the heave of the crowd rushing the Beatles stage
beneath the last movie craze: all this is happening
beneath their feet: a white crusted lip-sealed living
ship is, finally, going to bottom, open eyed knowing, and on
her side, her right side like my mother was when she died,
falling through every atmosphere there is. And the weight
of it all iis bearing down, a weight the living can’t feel, unless
the muscles knot, unless the lungs convulse, unless
climbing that mountain, we suck and suck at the thin
air and draw blood instead. From there it’s not much
different: the whale, the woman, a boot locked into the blue
glaze crust of snow: our ship slips, these bones sewn
in utero, yesterday or a hundred years ago, sink inside
the hollow of our belly, our cheeks, and, skin finally aside,
we ride while we slide, slip, slide, ride, another kind
of alive.
