Blue Whale (Poetry)

Drifting quiet as smoke, blue-grey,
advancing weightless as the waters part,
rejoining neatly aft to seal your monstrous passage,
scarless, effortlessly past.

A liquid glide - well lubricated, lazy locomotion -
a flexible slow-slide between cool currents of the ocean
where tonnage is no obstacle to grace;
your size a token, enigmatic spinx of the aquatic regions
where melting icebergs nudge your fortress side.

A flesh-built floating city:
collonies of barnacles claim squatter's rights and cling,
instinct-bonded, tight as ticks clustering,
dimly sense their rolling world slip by,
the great drum of their host's titanic heart
booming its low register of notes.

And deep in that cathedral of your throat
baleen plates hang quivering, an echo chamber full,
moans held in toxic krill suspension:
barely heard, your haunting de profundis
hovering on the psychic edge of human comprehension.

Soundwaves spill a riddle, the vocal key
transmitted through a void, received as garbled, incoherent
whine of tangled noise and whistled static
growing fainter as the fathoms stretch,
your voice a shadow on another frequency,
signal slipping, station switched from evolution's long wave
where your SOS is pitched
distress fading, almost out of range.