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