Today's poem is by Lucas Jorgensen

The Fictional Bureau of Whaling
        Moby Dick, ch. 61-65

Reading Moby Dick, I wanted the whales to win. Couldn't help it. It was the way they were described. Fish... Leviathan... God. The way in pictures, real life, they peer into you, unblinking, almost how a lover might. Melville must have known. In detail, a whale doesn't die until halfway, when, so far out at sea, reader, there is no land in sight. You must see the journey though. You must be speckled red by a dozen death spouts, chew whale steak in a lamp of its own light. From the crow's nest, watch the shot whale race against the length of its own breath, flame burrow into its killer's pipe. In flight, the stuck line moves so fast around the gunwale it ignites, rope smoke mixing with pipe smoke, fates knotted, scorched in twine. The whale's heart explodes! Melville writes. Reader, so does mine.

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Copyright © 2023 Lucas Jorgensen All rights reserved
from Salt Hill
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission