Derek JG Williams

Mammals

Awash on a beach
in Scotland, netting and debris
had filled, I mean killed,
the male whale, but
it was impossible to know
for sure the exact cause
of its demise. When I tell her,
Saskia says: he, not it—
and she’s right, as usual.
Unusual was the sheer
volume compressed
in the stomach
of the twenty-ton mammal—
his stomach. A whale
flies no flag, raises no army.
Another was found
in the Philippines,
eighty-eight pounds of plastic
cups, bags, and gloves
knotted it shut, while
an Italian whale
held only forty-eight.
My right hand holds a can
of IPA; I never
raise my hand in salute
to anyone, to anything.
I empty the ends down
my throat in one gulp.
I don’t know where
the can goes when I throw it
out. I see the news
each day and know little
for certain—light bends
and refracts in water.
I think it gets dark
when we die, and that’s it;
I don’t find such revelations
bleak. A whale is one
of many. It lives in a pod,
in the twilight between
the surface where it breathes
and the midnight where it swims.
I wish I could dive as deep
and live in the bright
quiet dark. Even now,
I disappear beneath
waves of chatter,
far into myself. Too much
of the time I want to be
left alone. On my favorite
beach the sand sings
when you walk across it—
at least that’s what the locals say.
Thoreau thought the sound
was more like
the waxing of a table.
I think it’s like sneakers
on hardwood in a game
of pickup basketball.
I ignore whatever
science is behind the noise
when I sun myself
in summer, feeling only
occasionally ashamed.
When whales wash up on sand
or beach themselves, they’re
buried in that land—
there’s little else to do
with a mammal
so large, so unruly.

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Derek JG Williams is an American writer. He is the author of Poetry Is a Disease (Greying Ghost Press, 2022). He holds a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from Ohio University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His poems and prose are published or forthcoming in Pleiades, Bear Review, DIAGRAM, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Plume, Banshee and on Boston's MBTA trains as a part of the city's Poetry on the T program. He lives in Germany with his wife and dog. Learn more about him at derekjgwilliams.com.