Great whale, grey whale
with the map of all the oceans
and their long songs in your brain,
where do you go
at the end of all your singing?
Weary one, oh
great, grave, gone whale,
who wove from that glittering string
a net so strong it held the sea's heave
to and fro,
you were always the deep diver, deeper now
than we can know
down and into the world beneath the world
with whalefall
and boneflower
and the deep sea snow.
What falls as snow
a mile deep
is skin and scales
the food we eat
the food we are
one and the same
dropped crumbs
the body's waste
into the dark
forgetting
of ourselves
the flakes and cells
of life let go
to drift to fall
though stranger weather
than we can imagine
sleepless
dreamless
deep
sea
snow…
Kind worms, blind worms
whom no one has seen or could love
how do you work, so dark, so cold
a mile below
as delicate as seamstress fingers, to unpick
the knots of bone?
Great bones, whale bones
that sank through blue green twilight
like an evening deepening forever
slow on slow,
to lie like spars of galleons
down where no
light comes, and nothing
lives, except … Osedax mucofloris,
swaying like a pale bouquet of petals,
the worm-flowers grow.
This is the world beneath the world.
where all life came from, maybe, maybe
where we go,
where we come home
to whalefall
and boneflower
and the deep,
the deep,
the deep
sea snow.
