Leviathan
by Bob Artlett
Robert Eastwood
The Deep
You
cannot see the huge heart
inside the blue whale, a room with four
chambers, where, head up, a child could step
through valves large as a saloon’s
swinging doors, but you may watch pelicans,
strung in endless thought, perhaps a dream,
a long journey pelicans imagine as they skim
the flooding shore in their concerted scan
of stretched-foam-shallows. Down their
pocketed snouts they read the sea, its screed
of ancient tales, for the one melodrama
whose finish sustains them. I’m thinking,
it’s all so serious––even the mussels’ gristle
has earnestness, a determined grip on shore’s
certainty. Shrouded in fog, grave intentions
stay within quiet coves. Currents wash & draw,
boneless creatures drift, jointed old & new,
the birthing scrum, bends with ebb & neap.
Of the real heart of the largest
beast
we know so little––what inspires a creature
one hundred feet long––nor do we really know
the slighted flow that birthed us, blurred ebb
& neap, the froth-tatted water seen roiling,
unrolling at our feet. It’s a well of all excretion,
yet I would suppose there are principalities
in its depths, whose emissaries, intent, practiced,
transact between our toes. After all, it’s blood’s
archetypal recipe, this amorphous brine,
shake of salt on our bitten tongues. Why look
from provenance toward shore? Why build
outposts on the sand? Could be, we tire
of the pull on our balance, the clumsy way
it wants us. Its graceless spray puts us off.
To rebuff, though, when we slur shallows,
ankle-deep, is to miss the swish of envoys’
frothy hems & burbled sighs.
