Two Poems

Kara van de Graaf

Giants of the Sea

 
Whales can create sounds in excess of 180 decibels, louder than a rocket launch,
that carry underwater for more than a mile. —BBC Earth

Speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. —Melville

 
 
At the Natural History Museum, I stand inside—
the great skull tipped upward, the ribs circling me

           like a gate. You giant, you patron saint
           of taking up space. Just the skeleton hangs

from reinforced steel cording, the mammal
in sum too massive to survive air. And while

           we fit our small bodies inside its bones,
           the living ones swim still underwater, each one

a blue organ of the earth that beats and beats,
circulates over hundreds of miles. They live

           by refusing to be quiet, by remaking the world
           with their sound. In the open waters of Alaska,

whales migrate each year with their calves,
hunt sardines, silver gasps, all one mind

           and so much flesh. Whales build a funnel of speech
           inside their skulls, a song they can shoot with

that stops the shoal’s swarming, pushes it
into frenzy. In the museum, cloaked in this body,

           I feel my loudness tunneling up like stunned
           fish shunting toward the surface,

ready to be taken gently in the mouth, ready
to meet the weapon they were made for.
 
 
 
 

Taking Up Space

 
As if Einstein were wrong, after
           all, as if the body were a black
hole that swallows and swallows
           but does not give back. The body
so lonely it needs to make everything
           part of itself, creates itself
through annihilation.
           Everything that is not it
will become it: crumbs
           on the tablecloth, the cake,
the plate that holds the cake,
           the wheat, small birds living
in a field, your field, your face,
           words stolen from your mouth.
As if all things beautiful
           must be sucked out
of living, must purr in the stomach,
           like the succulent fat at the marrow
of our bones, that centering
           that keeps the blood clean.
That millimeter of space that means
           all of us are apart, that means
we can never really touch
           anything, that quantum air
that strikes a distance between us
           in our airplane seats, in our beds
at night. Yes, I want that, too.

Kara van de Graaf is the author of Spitting Image, winner of the Crab Orchard First Book Prize in Poetry. Her individual poems appear widely in national literary journals, including The Southern Review, AGNI, New England Review, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the anthology Best New Poets. She is co-founder and editor of Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for poetry in the classroom. She serves as Assistant Professor of English at Utah Valley University.