scrimshaw of words

On Cape Disappointment
by Sara Clancy


Call me Jonah, instead.
I walked the wide rib
of the whale and found this haunted
curve, this other coast.

Yes, I have known continents
their names rise like anthems:
Finback, Sei, Great Blue.

Nights I slide into the sea,
breached by his myth, naked
elements of consequence
swell with explanation;
the krill clinging to my hair.

~

His reasons are simple
as weight. Simply fear
relative to size. He won't talk
equations and will not sing me
his sonorous history.
That is too easy a grief.

Instead he reveals
a black shadow skimming,
the need to kill or be swallowed,
a truth.

~

It's a small story now.
Here on the gray lip of the shore
I carve my own blind migration
in the scrimshaw of words,
a biography that ends
in the answering chord
of his deep blues.

In return I offer harbor
and these elegies,
these whale poems,
dragged like great gray bones
to an empty beach.

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With love,

Jessica, Elizabeth, and the Goodreads Team