It loses its milk teeth.
It sits on the ship and cries.
Thin, afraid,
it fashioned hooks to catch
the passing songs of whales so large
the men grew small
as distant, shrinking lands.
They sat on the ship and cried.
Hunger was the fisherman
who said dolphins are like women,
we took them from the sea
and had our way
with them.
Hunger knows we have not yet reached
the black and raging depths of anything.
It is the old man
who comes in the night
to cast a line
and wait at the luminous shore.
He knows the sea is pregnant
with clear fish
and their shallow pools of eggs
and that the ocean has hidden
signs of its own hunger,
and squid that flew
toward churning light.
Hunger lives in the town
whose walls are made of shells
white and shining in the moon,
where people live surrounded
by what they’ve eaten
to forget that hunger
sits on a ship and cries.
And it is a kind of hunger
that brings us to love,
to rocking currents of a secret wave
and the body that wants to live beyond itself
like the destitute men
who took the shining dolphins from the sea.
They were like women,
they said,
and had their way
with them,
wanting to be inside,
to drink
and be held in
the thin, clear milk of the gods.