-
JUDY JOHNSON
- Whale Songs
- What a world, where lotus flowers are
ploughed into a field…Issa
1:
- Praise the soft and shadow filter that
masks us
- as we glide under atmospheric radar.
-
- Praise as pulsing wet we stretch the
rubbered light
- over our triton backs and at dusk, give
in
-
- to the hectic rush of mucous and air
- in our blowholes, geysering
-
- the salmon shoals in the sky.
- Praise the horizontal swim.
-
- The sudden upturned snout derailing a
slippery
- thirty-ton train at a leap.
-
- Praise the outlines of our bodies
- as we breach, eclipsing the sun,
-
- limned with gold and barnacles,
- like eremetic gods emerging
-
- from a dark sabbatical amongst the crusty
oysters.
- Praise the first word which was suffused
-
- with the mollusc-and-brine
- kerthump of emotion and not the
dry arithmetic
-
- of meaning. Praise its liquid components,
- how they may be sung in a round, over and
over,
-
- across the miles, the echolocation of a
poem
- imbued for remembrance with the qualities
of rhyme
-
- and rhyme’s dogged shadow that
halves the pulse
- at the foam-edge turn of a wave.
-
- Praise the gentle, hissing lace of all
repetition,
- the ocean’s breathing in and out
-
- and the slow water-test of our engines
- at rest and swim, the internal rap
-
- of enormous knuckles, corrugation by
corrugation,
- down the galvanised tanks of our hearts.
-
- Praise upwelling without pretence
- as we unravel, sleep-eyed
-
- from the ocean’s misted spool.
- Praise the sun’s net-catch of water
-
- that rises on our early morning backs,
- slides off in the velvet unrobing of our
fall.
-
- But most of all praise our aquatic sense
of humour
- as we dive, tails hovering
like joke-shop rubber eyebrows.
2:
- When we die let us follow the paths of
our ancestors,
- shoreline pebbles quivering
-
- at the lick of our whale-scented
colognes.
- When we sink to the ocean floor
-
- let the razorfish twist and turn
- the screw of their manic mouths;
-
- let their bodies knot and unknot
- in the white bread of our flesh.
-
- Let the fissures of the earth cushion us,
- the voice of mourning hiss at midnight
-
- in vents of sulphur. Let the stingrays
- have our eyes; the sharks our soft
bellies.
-
- Let our skeletons remain unscribbled
- by the terrible beauty of scrimshaw,
-
- our white bones shine crystal, clinging
- like remoras to the deep.
-
- So be it. Nothing more to know of joy
- than its leap. Nothing more of sorrow
-
- than a blue surface left undisturbed,
- and over it, the commonplace
-
- fishmarket shriek of gulls.
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