“…unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him
is out of sight.” —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Turning back and back
on the small egg of the light
—blue in its bare intensity,
locus of the camera—how at home,
curving and unclumsy,
huge leather head, small eye,
old white gouge (a voice says
“propeller scar”), then out of the dark
its fin (so small, the bones of which
almost exactly answer to the bones
of the human hand), then
its side and side and side and later
(slow, as if stopped, floating, to watch
a windmarked bay) the tail,
gently, the flukes (broad palms),
sweeping particles of lightless drift,
then black. And the whirring heart
of the probe, the lens’s
jerky head, the voices of the team
sprung giddy from their job’s
entombment (“He’s trying
to figure us out”). Melville knew
the dragging and stabbing (the monster
horribly wallowed in his blood), the long warp
of the carcass flattened
and leaking, lashed,
ship listing over its haul. He never saw
the whale entire, eye-level,
unchased (undashed pride
of hull and spars) like this,
in the camera, whole
and curious,
the great breath held more
than an hour, and up there,
no captain with iron tip
(out of the nail-stubs
from horseshoes) waiting
for the spout,
the sound.
Amy Miller’s full-length poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Tinderbox, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA, and her most recent chapbook is I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (BOAAT Press). She lives in Oregon.