It Was The Sound of a Cloud Looking at Itself
Whenever I am walking in the woods and see a large, horizontal chunk of basalt covered in moss, I remember that whale on a beach when I was a girl.
It was large and stinking and completely out of place. I mean, I know a whale and a beach go together. Like the wind filling the gray-green limbs and clicking them like the sound of water on white water before the rain, or this large moss rock in the forest, in the foothills, near the mountains.
But these mountains are dry, dryer than those full of moss, and whales on beaches should stay only long enough to eat the seals. And those are orca whales, black and white, like an argument.
This was a gray whale. Dead. Its body the whale’s own elegy.
You know what I mean, if you’ve ever stayed on a beach long enough to find a dead thing. It isn’t long.
Now if you go to any ocean you’ll find the whole stretch of beach littered with bodies, those sand dents around them, the air kelp-ish, a brown smell. This is how we do beaches in 2020. The absent sea stars. The hollow crabs. Those sweet little shrimp that truly burrow into the tide pool bottoms leaving their ass calligraphy.
Well I can feel my heartbeat in my thumb.
I wonder if a whale hears its heart coming back to it over the blue water.
When my son runs too far into the forest so I can no longer see him, I close my eyes and think his name, a trochee, an aaaa and an uuuuh, held in like a heartbeat in a uterus, corralled by C and n and y and n. I think it like two gray notes that gallop out from my throat, over the snowberry and bracken fern, those brown waves.
A red flash of the thermal I’ve dressed him in, that triangle swatch of orange on his geometric coat.
He laughs and I taste summer, a stained palmful of berries.
The forest full of quiet birds, their songs resting.
The branches clack. I imagine my feet as webbed. I want to get home before the wind turns rough.
When finally I read the opening to that popular whale book, I was surprised to find four pages of baleanoptera epigraphs preceded by a brief etymology.
All of those whale obsessions. Orca, minke, white, gray, blue. When I conceptualize it, it’s the three hundred pound heart strung up in a museum, its ventricles wide enough to crawl into, the veined topography of its chambers like human skin. I think of how it resembles a large, suspended testicle. How they look when relaxed, after sex, or a shower.
Page three of Moby Dick it was something like this animal was named from roundness or rolling, how I think the flesh rolls, how one rolls over and then under, like a swell of water, and next-to, and all that salt. I sing things into the woods how I do on paper, remind myself not to show anyone.
But then the large clouds full of rain and how an out-building seems like a good place to step off the trail. The lichen blossoming its open doorway. I think I want to go in there and mouth the fairytale of how my life began. I want you to really listen, how an owl does, for a mouse on the trail. Or how a whale calf listens. Or a woman.
When Doris Lessing wrote “Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me,” she meant the way I feel about this large, moss stone, the sheaf of paper in my backpack. She meant it the way I meant it.
I know this is like a teenager.
When I was thirteen, my art teacher asked my mother if I had always been forty. She said, well, she spends a lot of time in the barn. I was painting the crest of a wave on a stormy ocean. I had memorized another poem about a dead girl. I wanted my teacher to tell me his story so I stayed after class cleaning out the yogurt containers full of paint residue, the high quality brushes. He had a beard and dark eyes. He let us chew gum in class. I want your teeth to be busy. Not talking.
I liked how the oil made streaks of brown after it fell out in the sink. How I could control the pattern of it by squeezing my fingers in a rhythm against the soft, wet brushes, the water running through. The rivulets of some clear water and some color, the delta around the drain. David Baker wrote “I have been silent for a long time now./ You know I am serious about the whales.”
I felt like that when I walked into this forest and then walked out.
The sky was the same slate gray. It was nearly three o’clock. The air around me wanting to be beautiful. I went home and made dinner for my family, vegetables and lentils, warm in a bowl. This is not a letter to Melville.
It seems like I meant to say it, but I never found the right place, but they call the study of whale songs “acoustic research.” While blue whales are known for their long, koan-ing songs that boom across the deep, gray whales, it is said, are likely to be recycling the air around themselves when they speak. Gray whales call in: low frequency moans, knocks, up-and-down sweeps, and rumbles. They seem to have a lot to communicate, and they do. Scientists call them a “highly acoustic whale,” which is the kind I want to be. I don’t think it will benefit anyone if I let this all go unsaid. I wonder, the way we do when we get to the end of a country song, if the beginning is really answered. If this were a country song, and not the song of a whale, would the large metaphor in the forest have gotten its point across? Is the moss its voice? I can’t stop there, so I will just say: after my son was born, and nearly didn’t live, and then did, I figured out how to be who I was, and decided I was a person who told the truth.
* * * * *
Thanks So Much for the Urn
Mary Oliver, whom we know to be an expert on many things, says observation without feeling is just a report.
Oh Mary, of the many wise Marys, I’m tired of feeling. A report sounds nice:
The studio houses six succulents.
K’s desire to attend to the museum of broken relationships.
Milosz, saying “language is my homeland,” over and over, into the microphone of M’s mind.
L’s desire to get out of the corner of Rob.
A story about Rob. A story about Rob and being stuck in a corner with Rob. No one wants this, but we’ve all been stuck in a corner with Rob. Rob, fucking let us out of the corner.
One way to get out of the corner, M reports, is by saying you have to go to the bathroom.
K turns on the light inside the wasp television. You can see it better in the dark, she says, disappointed.
Mary Biddinger says All of my decisions were sound. I was the message inside the bottle, and the bottle, and the rip tide. Everyone ooohs. Yes, says everyone.
Mary Ruefle says the best thing you can do
is carry a pair of little scissors,
snip small pieces of the world.
E wants to go to all the bathrooms.
M has to go to the bathroom, but when she’s there, she’ll probably stop writing, so she holds it in.
M has nothing to report, but she enjoys taking notes.
For example, tomorrow, her children are making a bird report. It is not like today’s bird report, in which some of the birds were fictional.
Tomorrow’s report will be all facts. This time, they will report 35 birds in the space of 30 minutes. All of the birds will be real: 7 species, one rare this time of year in this place, and they will have to verify: did they really see this bird with the bright orange beak? M will have seen every bird they have each seen, four sets of eyes on all 35, so the birds are confirmed, like a religion, M thinks, for which you must be anointed. The family will check boxes in the online chart. The Audubon Society is depending on their notes in the bird report. One way to verify the claim of spotting the rare bird is to document it with a digital image. The other way is with audio. Which type of observation would you like to upload? The last option is extensive notes describing the experience. This is beginning to feel more like a feeling, M will think, than a report.
* * *
Mary Ruefle: from “How We Met,” published online in Granta: https://granta.com/three-poems-ruefle/
Mary Biddinger: from “Partial Credit Syndrome,” in her book, Partial Genius, from Black Lawrence Press
Mary Oliver: a paraphrase of a sentence in her book, Our World, an elegy for her late partner