RPO -- Annie Finch : Watching the Oregon Whale

Annie Finch (1956-)

Watching the Oregon Whale

1A hard gray wave, her fin, walks out on the water

2that thickens to open and then parts open, around her.

3Measured by her delved water, I follow her fill

4into and out of green light in the depth she has spun

5through the twenty-six fathoms of her silent orison,

6then sink with her till she rises, lulled with the krill.

7Beads of salt spray stop me, like metal crying.

8Her cupped face breathes its spouts, like a jewel-wet prong.

9In a cormorant's barnacle path, I trail her, spun

10down through my life in the making of her difference,

11fixing my mouth, with the offerings of silence,

12on her dark whale-road where all green partings run,

13where ocean's hidden bodies twist fathoms around her,

14making her green-fed hunger grow fertile as water.

Notes

3] delved: turned up.

6] krill: tiny shrimp-like crustaceans "of the order Euphausiacea" (Oxford English Dictionary).

9] cormorant: large, voracious black sea-bird. barnacle path: a course that clings to the whale as closely as barnacles, crustaceons, adhere to ships and other objects in the water by their fleshy footlike stalk.

12] whale-road: an Old English kenning, "ocean."

Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
This poem cannot be published anywhere without the written consent of Annie Finch or Tupelo Press permissions department.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text:
Publication date note: Calendars (Dorset, Vermont: Tupelo Press, 2003): 8. Cornell University Library OLIN PS 3556
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition:
Recent editing: 1:2004/6/16

Composition date note: Composed 2000.

Other poems by Annie Finch