How many nautical miles do we swim to enter a world
after floating, after having been stars,
after emerging alone out of a sleeping world,
out of the contained darkness of a single human body.
At first the world is all water. The curved,
unfixed bones of the head drift
pale as a beluga I saw once beneath water.
Then, like first continents, the bones drift together
to form one land, or something nearly whole, nearly strong,
the infant beginning. It, he, she will be bathed
in the seawater, red brine, and the fallen light of planets.
Sometimes birth is violent
as the edge of a calving glacier in a world shaped by ice.
Sometimes birth is soft,
tender as the first sight of a loved one
or a green fern
pushing aside the whole weight of earth.
Sometimes death, too, is delicate
as ice floes in late spring
thinned and set afloat by sun and time and warmth,
from the place where winter is
a night of constant darkness,
and summer a midnight light.
Once I heard about a hunter
standing on ice
waiting for a seal to come up to breathe.
he found himself
adrift, floating toward the sea
with nothing to anchor or hold him.
Maybe, on his knees, waiting for the animal
to surface and breathe,
he’d been thinking of the beauty of lasting dawn
or how one morning
light fell across a woman’s thin-fingered hand
beautiful from work.
What if, for a man lost
in the wide, cold reach of sea,
no boat glides toward him, no rope is thrown,
or the woman with beautiful hands doesn’t miss him?
Even so it would be beautiful, the blue, the white
floating immensity.
In this place they say
the whales are children who died
and didn’t want to return as humans.
That’s why they smile so beautifully
moving up from dark water
to take a breath,
emerging to look at us a moment
before floating back into the unknown.
Do they remember long ago,
when they dwelt
in the dark uncharted world of human life,
recalling nights or lamps
or even the moments of human loneliness
how they open and close
with love or solitude.
Thinking all this,
I sometimes wish myself to disappear
back to the birthing sea
and glide away
with the whales I have seen,
and sometimes I am silent,
feeling the marvelous wave
of something no one knows made flesh.