Planetary Stories Project

"To Act Globally, Think Locally – Through Stories"

Black Earth Institute

Place: Newport, OR, USA

Watching the Oregon Whale
By Annie Finch

Watching the Oregon Whale

A hard gray wave, her fin, walks out on the water
that thickens to open and then parts open, around her.  

Measured by her delved water, I follow her fill
into and out of green light in the depth she has spun

through the twenty-six fathoms of her silent orison,
then sink with her till she rises, lulled with the krill.  

Beads of salt spray stop me, like metal crying.
Her cupped face breathes its spouts, like a jewel-wet prong.

In a cormorant's barnacle path, I trail her, spun
down through my life in the making of her difference,  

fixing my mouth, with the offerings of silence,
on her dark whale-road where all green partings run,

where ocean's hidden bodies twist fathoms around her,
making her green-fed hunger grow fertile as water.