Blue Whale

His father worked for the railroad and didn't approve,
so he took a pen name
from a Czech poet he admired:
Neruda. A locomotive of history and hardware,
whose voice hauled onions and sugar,
pig iron and black lace, to remote mountain crossroads--
it's hard to imagine him afraid, as if he were one of us,
of the words of his father.
How strange it must have been for him
to learn that Gabriela Mistral had become a poet
when her lover, who worked for the railroad,
killed himself one night under a barrage of stars.

He was a blue whale,
and unlike the real one, whose baleen
lets in nothing but the red cloud
of krill it lives on, he swallowed everything:
the gray periwinkles he collected from tide pools
and the whole Spanish Civil War, the raw jicama
he loved to douse in a salt bath
and the coal miners' strike of 1947.
When they issued a warrant,
he crossed the Andes on horseback
to Mexico, following almost invisible trails
of smugglers through the forest, and what he remembered
was entering a moist cave
filled with a mountain of cheeses
hidden by miners. There's no way to say this
ironically: he found steam rising
from a volcanic sulfur spring
in a stone basin carved by the water itself,
and he bathed in it, the rock whorls
echoing the delicate chambers of the sea snails he loved
and the labyrinth of an ear
large enough to hear the ocean break on Isla Negra
ten thousand feet below.

He stood behind a podium
reading his poems, and his mouth was enormous--
one could see into the cave of his throat:
paintings of bison on the walls. Incredible
all that erupted from his jaws: goats and handbags,
hieroglyphics and a three-legged stool,
an Easter procession down the one mud road
of a whistle stop, the black seeds of a watermelon
and the monastery outside Madrid
where his poems were copied on white shirts
if they were not too stained with blood,
as there was no paper, but it did not matter
because even paper was in the poems.

It was all cast out of his mouth
until the hall was filled like an ark and the ovation ebbed
and he went out the pneumatic doors
into the night and submerged once more,
an extraterrestrial mammal
encrusted with dingy yellow barnacles
whose songs were sometimes too low for the human ear
but caused tremors
felt in the ribcage and knees, like an earthquake,
even in a quiet village of the Cordilleras
where children were carrying their smudged books
home from school, curious and earnest,
memorizing all the oceans of the world.