Anchorage

Anchorage

you don’t even glance

     at the cause of your doubt

so how can you tell

     what form I take?

                                                Kathleen Jamie 

                                                Fragment I

It’s as brief not as the picture itself

but the length of time I want to

look at it.  I think it’s been in a cabinet

for a long time and it’s the picture

of that picture that I’m seeing now

and what’s behind the glass that I have

to look away to think about it.  Nothing

violent nothing sexual nothing shy, just

a piece of bone but I know I won’t

really see until I put my eye against

a blacker space and then the image, well,

it’s as if I’m listening to it and it’s not

because I was seeing a whale’s eardrum

though that’s what I looked deeper

to see and the label’s faded and there’s

the shadow of other specimens (balls

a crow has swallowed, and small

big as my fingertip really, shells, to lend

some sense of context) almost blurring

the words so I do I look and narrow

my gaze and limit the light (and lately

look through the very bottom

of my glasses) and yes that’s exactly

what it is, a whale’s eardrum.  I notice

straight away how curved it is, not

a single jagged edge, as if all those years

sending out song and taking in all that

song it could swim through:  the ice,

the heat, the seeing completely

on the inside their mate (and wouldn’t

it be so kindly natural for us to be

able to find ours that way and not have

to reject or be rejected) and later, if not

for a predator or a man, a baby and the sound

of their face!  it’s enough for me to just see

it for now though I have to say wouldn’t

it be, oh wouldn’t it to put that eardrum up

to my cheek and lips and let it finds its way

to my own ear—wouldn’t it be oh wouldn’t

it if I could shrink down and walk right in,

like I’d been a long time away and welcomed

back, and to save me

from breaking apart completely, because listen

wouldn’t sound inside there just turn

me into, oh, I don’t know, mica or some

natural shellac, or what I’m getting at

is fragile and I couldn’t get out fast enough

but they’d know, they’d know, prophets

they are.  I’d like it, I’d like it a lot, to be able

to hold it and make my hand the shape it makes

so I could come away with something to hold,

like clay folded over and over and then

pinched, with those two holes for listening

and letting go, Or, crudely, and still

clay, a heart in utero, pressed into

the almost liquid bones and between

them until bone after bone a near-solid cage

is made and it’s a heart, a shock absorber

(maybe that’s why the cage) and it will pump

and drum, pump and drum out

our whole entire lives and oh but if I could

lay my own ear to my chest and listen

I think it wouldn’t be all that much

different than what a whale hears

when she hears! when she’s living out her life,

just everyday living, her little pricks of terror

or sadness or all things glad to hollow it.