Whale talk.

Mann, Chris

Whale talk

   Listening to you in my headphones
   as I explore your website on a stoep
   that's anchored to a street in Africa
   I try to imagine what you're saying
   as you swim the ocean off Hawai'i.

   I shut my eyes. Above rock pinnacles
   the undersea ceiling silvers in flurries
   as you glide your dark grey airship
   across dim slopes of coral and sand.
   Fish-glints dart below your fuselage.

   I listen and listen, to sounds like trills,
   like elongated, high-fluted vowels
   and loud brash snorts from a vuvuzela
   and have to say I can guess a pattern
   but cannot make sense of you at all.

   Long eerie howls muddle my neurons
   and then a splutter, a fuzz of clicks.
   Are you talking territory and food
   or evolving your calf's vocabulary
   in Darwin's deep-sea language lab?

   I imagine you then barrelling upwards
   and thrusting that barnacle-encrusted,
   that seaweed-dangling snout of yours
   right out of a swell, standing a while,
   paddling your flukes, to eye my kin.

   They sit in a boat, cameras flashing.
   When I translate your body's idiom
   you shout out loud, But who are you?
   Out harpoons shelved, you stare at us
   across the suture of a bloodied divide.

   My eyes still shut I watch you crash
   forward into the sea. In the beginning,
   I whisper, was and will be the word.
   Which is a start to voicing our kinship,
   a landlubber's way of singing the sea.