Disentangling a Gray Whale

By Maya Khosla

Water minus air becomes wound.

Her blowhole, bursts of breathing,

trapped in an endless curtain of netting

and weights designed to confine tuna.

She tries to surface. The body greater

than two double-decker buses in length

and girth. We close in, hesitant,

wondering if freeing her is worth the risk

of a nervous tail slap into oblivion. After all,

she may be too far behind to sing her way

back to the rest of her pod.

Song bouncing from underwater canyon

to canyon mapped by sound and echo.

She may not endow us with any answers

to the sea of unknowns. She may be one

of the strays deafened into idiocy

by the Navy's sonic booms

clocking the globe with the constancy

of gunfire. She may simply be

an upshot, a bulbous, barnacled emblem

of our earth-ship's sinking—

the grimace of her mouth

not unlike her blue gods miles below

holding their own while bubbles of breath

are spiraling up like prayers for salvation.

Copyright Credit: Maya Khosla, "Disentangling a Gray Whale" from All the Fires of Wind and Light. Copyright © 2019 by Maya Khosla. Reprinted by permission of Maya Khosla.

Source: All the Fires of Wind and Light (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2019)