ON HARLEY DAVIDSONS AND BOWHEAD WHALES

I. The Angel

Stand next to an Inupiat whaling captain,
Call him umialik. Forearms bristle
With torque. Pit him against a Hell's Angel, make
The Angel 300 lbs of tattoo. Voice-ripped
Throat of the wind, bellied-up against beard, bandanna,
Oily stare. His own beard like the fine hair
Off the edge of baleen. Ice hot as fire,
Air torn by silence, watch the Angel breach.
The umialik throws a seal-sized leg
Over his 600 cc Harley Roadster. He yanks the throttle
Back: wolf ruff wind, rippling aurora, halo of danger.
A ravens' caw muffled with "anger," so close to "danger."
An absolute zero at the core of the bluster,
Bright trim of parka cuffs flash in the roar.

II. Chrome

An open lead shattered with sun fills with bowhead.
Spring, Harley perched, poised over the frozen Arctic
Ocean. Ice-ravaged beach, here all is gesso
Desert, Harley glitters at mid depth,
Perception of foreground and background
Reversed by the ice-white clouds
Cupping vectors of buckshot-wind
In their domed centrifuge. Our captain
Appears on the azimuth, walking a polynya,
Shotgun slung over shoulder, using the dulled
Black and wincing chrome as his bead.
The wind wails clean as calf to cow.
The two wheels a set of distant crosshairs:
Huge, unblinking, one for each eye.

III. The Photojournalists

Atop an ice ridge, inhaling smoke of air,
Cigarette, he flips open the cellular.
The wind argues with the force
Of his voice insisting on the old taboos.
He blames the lackluster season on
"Those fucking French photojournalists!"
He says into the phone, "Damn accent scares the whales."
Without hesitation, as if he could know, "That fucking
French lady, no menstruating women on the ice!"
And adds, "They're cooking! No cooking!"
He swills the sandy end of his coffee,
Crushes the Styrofoam cup, tosses it aside.
Heading home his snow machine
Leaps crest to crest in splashes of snow.

IV. Cargos

Adrift and silent, beads of sweat freeze
In mid-air: iridescent pearls. He hoists the seal-skin prow
Of the umiak over bank and drifts into the open
Lead as if placing a white moon in a blue sky.
Shouldering 70 lbs of brass whaling gun like a pistol,
He drifts toward their dawn passage, their dark cargos
burden his own dream of surfacing.
A fifty-foot bowhead breaches, disappears, surfaces:
There is nothing but what is not surface: surface,
So close to "breath," a dark oasis in a desert of white.

V. Whale Dream

The whale enters its dream.
Who's to say what captain, what whale,
Hasn't steered a dream or two through our own?
The tripartite flower of its mouth engulfed
With diatoms barely visible to the naked eye.
Such bulk comes from such small seed--
A bowhead whale's testicles out-weigh most men.
Whales dream, the studies show, of danger:
That slap of pungency in the nostrils, half
Over-ripened olives, half pickled herring
Is the aroma of a greasy lipped child
Laid back in a snow bank eating, half
Asleep and pot-bellied with whale, a dream.

VI. Whale Light

The captain harvests this largest of black fruit.
His Harley Davidson strikes up the flame
Of connections and calibrations: the fine
Tuned legacies, half size and half strength.
Rider or ride, whaler or whale, which opens
The world to the other's angles of purpose?
Blood on snow, the indelicate skin, the muktuk,
The Inupiat delicacy. The less-loved blubber
Once lit lamps in East coast lighthouses, libraries.
Whale light, poems illumined by half-butchered bowheads.
The captain pulls half a harpoon head from slick, sleek
Mush of skin; by the lack of brass, design, he knows
Its generation. He knows where it came from,
How it was made. Its age his own.

[back to David Koehn]