ECHOLOCATION
BY JENNY MOLBERG
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
-Toni Morrison
I think of you, my lost girl, when the wing
of a tailfin rises beside the boat, dripping
in salted robes. This movement, like song,
pulls me under, where murk reveals
the obscurities of loss. The language
is epic, invisible, submarine. A child
hears her home in clefs of water, in whale song:
unfathomable, plosive, drummed, the loudest blues
on earth. A thousand feet down, more join in the refrain.
Another endangered syntax descends.
*
Nothing on the sonogram for weeks.
The nurse’s dull hand like a river stone
on my belly; the doctor’s wintry eyes
scolded me, I thought. Oh, secret grief.
Are we not all sick with our own scolding?
When they found your heartbeat
I thought this could be a girl. Just as quick,
you were gone. The question, the what-if:
always regret. But that is too simple.
To regret is to be too late.
To regret is to refuse to swim further down.
*
On the operating table, I thought of Jonah:
three days, three nights he prophesied
in the sunken body’s cave, his mean bed
the boggy, pagan tongue of a monstrous fish.
The squelched prayer, when my life was ebbing
away, I remembered you—then mercy,
the sonorous brute relieved of his god-
fearing freight. Jonah, spat out on the beach,
reborn in his fear, the heart of the sea a God-stone
in his gut. But the whale was the merciful one,
holding a dove on its tongue. Don’t you see?
You pulled me from my mind’s shadowed corners,
near drowned in the cage I’d made of my bones.
*
You were the bird inside my veins’ blue trees.
That night, I woke; I remembered you—
a small heartbeat inside me gone still.
I try to convince myself of an afterlife:
when a whale dies, it lives a second time.
It must drop to great depths, then an ecosystem
is born of its body. The sleeper sharks will tear
soft tissue from the corpse, its skeleton
colonized by a million worms. A root-like structure
grows into the bone and all the little animals feed.
No one is sated. No regret.
*
The dream again: a beach strewn with humpback calves.
Each spews its white jet into catacombs of air.
I press my whole body’s strength against them
to no avail. The bodies are black dunes
on the mute white sand. I give up, walk the road
of corpses, and come to it, the puzzle:
the clean jaw of a female cow.
I measure the slow lines. Each baleen plate
a glassy divot. When my work is done
I hear singing. The whales, fins like wings,
flood the atmosphere as clouds. The heaviest,
the lightest things. My heart is full of them.
*
I was prey in the hot slick belly of the sea.
I wanted to die of anger. I wanted
to watch all things burn. A tamarisk sprang up
beside me, and I thought it was God.
A worm ate the green plant and I thought, God,
devour me. But the worm was full
of the saltcedar leaves. The earth refused
to wake, to weep. So I walked the tide’s edge
to hear the waves’ hushed dirge.
The muted tongues of the dead whisper,
God is covetous. He will not tolerate your sorrow.
I lose what I love and stay alive. I try.
*
I walk the shallow water, for what emerges
in its absence. And yours. Deep down,
whale song so loud: if not for ocean water,
the human ear would burst.
The sun harpoons the late day sky.
Beneath my feet, a million shards of rock
and shell, things that once housed the living.
And deeper, the call of one animal to another.
Now and again, you breach the heart’s surface:
this is your sounding; this is your wake.
