Coast Guardsman

Coast Guardsman

I know by the time I get there it will only be

recovery.  Because when the call comes they're already

drowned.  And it’s near twenty miles but we pushed it even so…

I’m the best cold water swimmer

on duty—and the beach it seems is one body it with hundreds

of many-tentacle heads, one massive squid, a beached wreck, 

but when I begin throwing the hook and pulling bottom

I’m thinking about last week and that whale

who blew into my open boat: I was rowing through fog,

and while someone blew a horn on shore and waved

the flag to come in I’d looked back at the whale and dropped

anchor, tipped and slipped myself into the shock.  It’s like the first time

I’d fired a gun and all I could smell was salt

and burning pepper and the air was a wad of cotton and far away bells, and

I was a long time crossing that bridge from one ear to the other.

That whale.  Her eye was a slice of lime, the whole world was

the rim of her lid, unsurprised.  I just had to

think of her when I pull each one up into (out of?) the pocked and leach-

busy dark.  It was like pulling my own

sopped body into the rolling boat, (when the wind had picked

up and in the chop she’d seen me, that whale, and I’d seen her, we’d, well—

…Sweet God.

Sweet Jesus...  ) until beyond me the  massive body

on shore shreds, strip by strip, one by one,  grating like cheese when kids

start coming in, when the claims are made…

I throw my hook.  I drift and throw my hook.  I'm a pinch,

a dimple on rim of the gargantuan blow hole sealed shut, sunk.  Until

all twelve are surface again I'm just eye.  Just mouth and nose.  Solid as

the shore.