BY VIVIAN EYRE
Whale Watch
-after Kara Hoblin’s watercolor, “Whale”
Whale, the color of moonlight,
so pale that I see inside the body,
the bones sketched in lamp black ink.
The enveloping seas like bruises:
aubergine, pink, hospital green.
A water-washed whale, defenseless.
Defenseless is companion
to wound, what we carry inside.
Are the swell-up of wounds
what amusements wall off? Whale watch cruises.
Arms outstretched over the rail.
Cameras begging Closer, Closer.
I want my arms around this body.
The long streamlined knobby spine,
I long to touch before
she breaches out of the sea,
twirls acrobatically in mid-air,
plunges with one brash slap to break open
the sea door. I want to caress the flesh,
ripped at the flare of the fluke
by iron barbs or blunt force blows.
I want the flipper, the bony flanges,
so like a human hand, in my hands,
as light as a scrim of mist.
Like bait
There’s no turning away
from the x-ray.
*
It comes back to me,
the sweetness of fishing
alongside my sister.
Sun not yet reaching its zenith,
lines plunged
into the dark border under dock planks.
The yank, reel up, hook
cleanly cut from the fishing line.
My sister pointing, Look, as a turtle
popped up its head. The thief. We laughed
at the theft, then decided the turtle
was lucky.
*
The hook
I wonder if it hurt when turtle swallowed
the wire, arched & tipped with a barb
biting into the pectoral lobe. The film’s rays
blazing between the breastplates—a black dot—
is it a clot, the heart?
Did the joy of being with my sister
cause such suffering?
*
It’s said that the first breast-plate armor
worn by the Great Turtle was a fragile seashell,
the sign says, beckoning us
around the turtle rescue tanks.
*
Only now in front of this x-ray, do I see
what cannot be swallowed.
Vivian Eyre is a New York-based poet, and the author of the poetry chapbook, To the Sound (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have been published and are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, The Fourth River, Moon City Review, Quiddity, Pangyrus, Spire, Bellingham Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Buddhist Poetry Journal. She serves as the guest curator for the Southold Historical Society’s Whale House museum.
Process Note: I wrote “Whale Watch” over a number of weeks in response to Kara Hoblin’s watercolor, “Whale.” That painting hung in a cafe where I buy chai lattes. The contradiction between the sperm whale’s “smile” and “the colors of bruises” haunted me. Chance encounters often lead me to exploration on the page. What are the chances that I’d be invited to tour a turtle hospital? That steely hook in the turtle’s X-ray. The fishing. It all forced me to see how my habitual ways of being harm the natural world.