Читать книгу The Anti-Grief - Marianne Boruch - Страница 11

A Rescue

The whale might, she might vaguely recognize

human cries of those drowning

as some distant tribe of fin

and blowhole. And the damaged

submarine, her cousin once twice

three times removed, huge and gray

in the blood-let Atlantic’s notorious

cold beyond cold lined at bottom with

outrageous fish whose photos in a glossy

seasick book could wide-eye you

to some moon creature,

their razors on stalks bright-blinking

right off their heads to terrify or protect.

So the great species of the planet

unite underwater where we earth-stuck

oxygen eaters rarely look or think to look.

And on hearing those cries—

Wait, doesn’t the whale have a massive

mammal heart, a child could

run through it. That sound, such a flood

to the brain. (Brain curious as a calf in spring

folded up, tangled, still wet

from the going.) Do something! billows

and bells through the hopeless

slate-blue. The whale’s identical first

cell of us too in that watery void before

we turned sea creature here,

land breather there, damned the same to

archangel across, down deepest

lost. Stunned ocean. Unquiet.