What I am interested in are the strategies for maintaining the silence and the strategies for breaking it.
—Toni Morrison
The picture was called The Southern Fishery,
in which a sperm whale levered out of the sea
at a shocking angle, its jaw agape,
and in the distance the white-bellied mother ship
standing off from the many-footed parasite
of men scudding and floundering in their peascod boat
toward the dark sublime and the ritual of
murder with the harpoon and flensing knife.
Day after day I passed the thrift store window:
ten dollars framed, that blunt head breaching the green billow
and no takers, the toppled rage and fear
collapsing in a welter, the thread of each oar
driving on through a low bush of spume
toward some roiling, exposed thing in me, some
disabled sense of self and intention.
And then one day I looked and it was gone,
with just a bent nail remaining in its place,
leaving me to imagine where it was.
Now I cross the street, but my eye resorts there still.
I should have bought it and turned it to the wall,
that flayed body hanging chained and slack,
the jaw that broke the sea and dared to speak.