Wishing you had been speared by ten harpoons,
washed up like animate detritus,
you yield to gravity
compressing kidneys, liver, spleen, and heart.
The sun’s ascending, brightening
the cirrus in the blue.
The crabs and mussels never notice you
struggling to breathe yards from the sea,
where you had been a bird
soaring through the lightness of the water
that, fifty million years ago,
had summoned you to crawl
to her caress. As waves, immense or small,
briny or fresh, may well invite us
impulsively to fling
ourselves into the depths, you too have heard
a signal you could not outsmart,
drawing you back to land.
Leviathan, here on the very strand
you’d left so long ago, you know
your pod keeps crying out
your name and, as the day keeps growing hotter,
you dream with one frail, final spout
these waves are more than dunes.
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