“The Great White Whale”
– after Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Chapters 134-136
Imagine mad Ahab’s albino beast
catapulting
his behemothic bulk
skyward;
plowing ferocious furrows
in the Pacific blue,
streaking a snake-like foam
in its wake;
waves like
cataracts
cascading off
that coffin-shaped forehead;
his ponderous back
impaled
like a bull in the ring,
by a shock
of rusted harpoons, lances;
a seabird oddly
rocking on a shattered pole,
tail feathers,
like fluttering pennants,
mocking
Nantucket’s intrepid whale-hunters, trapped
within a whale-
whipped maelstrom.
Lament
Pity the saber-tooth cat
last seen with its spotted coat
during the late Pleistocene –
its curved canines, the size of
white bananas, piercing deep
into the neck of a sloth
once big as the bison or
a wooly mammoth; that free,
and seemingly easy snack
half-submerged in coal-tar seep,
only to be trapped with its
prey, then 10,000 years out
deemed an artifact of fate.
Pity the lion, both ears
riddled with bullet holes;
his lanky belly laid out
in dry grass, disemboweled
by a half-tusked, waggling
warthog protecting her piglets.
Pity, too, our barnyard cat,
half his mouth bitten off one
morning, by a cornered rat,
bagged by a farmer and tossed
into the Merrimack. Rings
widening in the water,
a drooling cat’s epitaph.
Pity them all except the rat.
Ex Nihilo
inspired by Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
A dot,
so dense, so hot,
it shot in all directions – space
fat with matter, time and energy,
in no time flat
inflating that starless extremity
like a bell-shaped balloon
with a ghostly afterglow.
Was it luck or by design
this sublime, forever-
expanding evening sky in time
spurred, like a burst of fireworks,
billions of galaxies
wheeling like whirligigs – each one
spangling hundreds of billions
of suns such as our own? This
swirling universe undulating;
at times, so agitated
some bleeding star
yawns a hole
too deep for us to plumb.
Don Kimball is the author of three chapbooks, Tumbling (Finishing Line Press 2016), Journal of a Flatlander (Finishing Line Press 2009) and Skipping Stones (Pudding House Publications 2008) and he has a full-length book of poetry, Late Autumn, Raking (Kelsay Books), coming out soon. Don is a longstanding member of the Powow River Poets and the former president of the Poetry Society of N.H.