Marine Mammal: Nadia, Marianne Moore, Bela

Marine Mammal

Nadia:

There is passage in 20,000 leagues under the sea, where captain nemo serves the narrator cheese made from whale’s milk

Since then, I have hungered for it, dreamed of it, I imagine it tastes like little boneless white sardines, but milder, or like drinking soft sea moss

Cheese made from rat’s milk

Mouse legs are said to taste like licorice (or anise) when roasted

The mongols drank mare’s milk and mare’s blood, and distilled the two into a liqueur which made them fierce before a battle

They rode their horses with pieces of raw meat tucked under the saddle, to tenderize them

They never bathed

They were epicures

But still, imagine, Bela, suckling at a whale’s teat while the huge mass of the whale budges gently around you

Marianne Moore:

Minute marine steam dredges with wide mouths/ their base of operations designated by the sun/ mouths shut but living every one/ their jaws swung out and made voracious in the thin/ translucent ferment of the sea as it comes in

Bela:

Whales mother mollusks with their warm pillows of dung

They are the willows of the sea, still blowing clouds

Shields for sharp rays and sting rays

They intimidate

Thought and sky thought itself,

To be a mollusk is to honor whale mothers.


Nadia:

marine mammal creates, retains

its own heat, then perpetrates

one massive parturition,

calving among krill, unwatched

what hungers were hatched

at whale’s gorgeous teat

Bela:

Unspeaking, Marine mammals moo as they smoulder

In time crusting them in broad beating-heart tumors

Some tumors are bulgeous and some long and lean

Some plaints cannot steam through the grills of baleens

Nadia!:

No fish eye glimmers in the unlit deep

No scales shimmer, no flames of coral burn

Along the colorless perimeter

Where arthropods feast on mammalian bones.

Huge eyeless worms appreciate neither

Marrow-filled corridors nor flesh clinging

Still in ribbons to spectacular bones.

Now the tender maternal whale breast makes

New forms of food, bare materials for growth

Of strange infants, starving in repulsive depths.