One thinks all day: the unresolved
thought is as the whale of which
one thinks as huge
and blue and dead, which drifts
all day obliquely down
a gradient of blues,
beryl to royal to naval to
abyssal plain, borne hard upon
by higher water, pressure as
of consciousness upon
the aching blank at the mind’s nadir.
The settled whale is scattered—as
blubber into sleeper sharks
and strange crustaceans, bone
into the boneworms come to bore
obscurely toward last lipid stores
and drift away—as a greater thought
into its lessers scatters
among analogs in too long
an analogy, its lucid hues diffusing
outward throughout
concentrated black
