When I’m Humble Enough

When I’m Humble Enough

The minute they

ducked through the bothy door

they switched to English.

Even among themselves

they spoke English now,

out of courtesy…

                                                Kathleen Jamie

                                                The Gather

I wonder what they call themselves when we've not been

among them.  Whales I mean.  In their language.  Before

we arrived.  Must some rub and rumble come in their hollows

that’s as galvanic as lightning and as sear-shocking?  

Or not depending.  We say whale in English—

walvis in Dutch.  In the Inupiaq agviQ though

maybe the most intimate of all since they got

to know them first and as they may justify

accepted the offerings of their Gods.  But they?

Their presence in themselves?  What is their name?  I like

to imagine it comes as a pulse of something or a breath

or a great orchestra of heartbeats and the echo

is something maybe we could touch on with a kind

of leather tooling punch and firm cardstock paper

and a rule stylus, the kind the blind used to use

to write with.  Raised dots.  Straight enough for

fingertips.  And all that heft of sound.  Right to left.

I’m going back to thinking about Geerat Vermeij

and the sanctitude of his sighted fingertips.  How they learned

to stroke the bones and stones and all manner of old

things, curios, and they must’ve, I’m sure of it,

come alive under his aphotic gaze and it named

itself and maybe because he hadn’t touched it

first, the word I mean, in some book, after his fingers

learned how to read, it was entirely itself in his hands.

Really, what I wanted to say was I saw myself alive inside

the exhiled ribs and hide, no, the entire cavity of a sperm whale

and smelled all that was left of her oil that still

to this day oozes out of her and wished we were humble
enough to get to a knee, both knees, and bow in their rumble  

tongue and feel it all around us and not parry it

away with our own feeble and petty attempt to need

to know something.  It must start—here’s my righteous!

being blind and naked and afraid, bent down into it

and pressed, face hidden or right out in the open like

the blind, whose milky eyes fend off all that light 

to see with and get to feeling instead, intimate, invited.

                                                                        I imagine at last

the bulging tongue is lifting to let me feel it with my palms

and thumbs and hold it up like I’m scooping water

to my lips to feel, soon, a raising me up out of needing it

at all, wet and tragic and electric and shattering, all that is puny

in me, and needy, and brief, and, yes, humbly without speech.