A Proper Burial

A Proper Burial:

The Whale. 

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.