INK BLOTS

Perhaps because there were currents swirling

within the silence, or because a seagull

was shrieking outside the window

or in my head, or because in the end I had to

say something, I said I saw a whale.

Go on, he said. A blue whale, then, I said.

Go on, he said. And because it seemed important

to start at the beginning, I told him of a wolf

that had grown weary of the shallow

society of wolves and had left its pack and drifted

out into the deep ocean. Go on, he said,

and I told him how the salt water had held

the wolf, and how the wolf liked to float, cradled

by the blue, and how its legs transformed

into flippers and its body became huge

and blubbered against the cold, so that the wolf

floated suspended inside that giant body,

just as that body floated in the ocean,

and how the blue water stained that body blue

as if the sea were made of ink. Go on, he said.

In time, I said, it found it could no longer return

to the land, and some nights it sang songs

of its lost pack, and evermore it wandered solitary

in the great ocean. And what else? he asked.

So I told him of how once a blue whale finally

came ashore, how wounded by a harpoon

and desperate to breathe, it beached itself

near Bragar, on the small island of Lewis,

and how they had planted its jaw-bones

as an arch by the side of a road, and had hung

the harpoon from it, as a memorial, perhaps,

or perhaps as a warning. And I told him of ship-strikes,

and how easy it was to become entangled

in the debris of other people’s nets, and also of the noise

their engines make, and how finally their sonar

had drowned the last of my mourning songs.

And these smaller ink blots, he asked,

that surround the whale, what are these? Jellyfish,

I said quickly, not meeting his eye, spineless companions

of the whale, translucent blobs of floatingnothing, 

drifting along with it. For I knew better

than to tell this man the truth,

that the blue whale had sought refuge

in the basement-womb of the deepest blue ocean,

and that there were depth charges

exploding all around it.

“Ink Blots” was written by Matt Quinn for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2019, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
Art by Ningiukulu Teevee