The whales can’t hear each other calling
in the noise-cluttered sea: they beach themselves.
I saw one once— heaved onto the sand with kelp
stuck to its blue-gray skin.
Heavy and immobile
it lay like a great sadness.
And it was hard to breathe with all the stink.
Its elliptical black eyes had stilled, were mostly dry,
and barnacles clustered on its back
like tiny brown volcanoes.
Imagining the other whales, their roving weight,
their blue-black webbing of the deep,
I stopped knowing how to measure my own grief.
And this one, large and dead on the sand
with its unimaginable five-hundred-pound heart.
This poem first appeared in Echolocation (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2018).
—
Sally Bliumis-Dunn is Associate Editor-at-Large and features writer for PLUME, and teaches the Personal Essay at the 92nd Street Y in NYC. Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, New Ohio Review, On the Seawall, The Paris Review, PLUME, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, the NYT, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third full-length collection, Echolocation, was published by Plume Editions/Madhat Press in March 2018 and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award as well as the Julie Suk Award.
