Tuesday
So apparently that (relatively) tiny bulldozer and those (relatively) tiny tugboats played an important role in freeing the gigantic container ship stuck in the Suez Canal, leading my friend Glenda Funk to tweet out an allusion to The Little Engine That Could. The story, which celebrates the power of positive thinking, functions as American folklore, with no one individual able to take credit for it.
I’ve always found the little engine a bit too smug at the end of the story, but I think that’s because I was brought up not to pat myself on the back. If you do your job, a quiet satisfaction is all the reward you need. Even a triumphalist “I thought I could” isn’t allowed.
I’d make a lousy politician.
Christmas toys were not at stake in the Ever Given debacle. Billions of dollars, on the other hand, have apparently been lost.
As I thought about the ship being freed, various poems about whales came to mind. After all, the Ever Given was meant for the vast vistas of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, not beached in a narrow canal. Scott Bates’s poem about soaring whales comes to mind:
Whales
Whales have a tendency to move heavily
On land it’s all that blubber
Keeps Whales from skipping down the street like little girls
Or balls of rubberFor if by chance a Whale you should encounter
Lumbering
Down Madison Avenue
On the first day of SpringYou would perhaps be reminded of The New York Public Library
Trundling through the park
On a midsummer’s eve surrounded by children
Or of Noah’s ArkOr of the Pennsylvania Station
But if you should become a Gull
Drifting quietly over the Antarctic Ocean
Illimitable and coolYou would see Whales below like Swallows dance
Like Swallows on a pond
They would skip off lightly across the green water
And soar without a sound
The Ever Given is (relatively speaking) soaring now, not lumbering or trundling. Our spirits, strangely, have been lifted.
Another appropriate whale poem: I’ve been reading Harry Eyres’s Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet, and came across a poem that Eyres wrote that fits the Ever Given even more–at least when it was still stuck.
It’s a strange poem to include in a book like this since it has only an elliptical connection with the Roman poet. Horace’s actual name was Quintus Horatius Flaccus, so the “flaccid” descriptor for the whale appears to apply to the poet as well. Horace was apparently short and fat and his ribald verse–which grew out of his own sexual appetites–immortalized him as the whale’s penis immortalizes the great beast. The giant whale’s skeleton, like Horace’s immense poetic achievement, lives on forever.
Whale Burial
Flaccid, beyond recognition,
your soft remains are littered on the beach.
Flung up on this coast between continents
a week ago, you had form and substance.
People came to inspect
your unearthly proportions.
Once a generatin such a marvel happens,
you give names to places.
You began to dry and rot
simultaneously
You sagged and aged,
a shi-sized bag of bones and juices.
Downwind it smelled like a fish factory,
but you retained vestiges of yourself.
Now the dissolution has gone too far,
it has become a public nuisance.
A small army of men, the burial party,
a grave as big as a house.
The earth-scooper scrabbles ineffectualy,
trying to trasp your slippery secretions.
It spreads you out farther and deeper.
Part of you seep into the sand,
membranous sacs of blood and semen.
Your skeleton is distributed
among the people.
Your jaws will be rejoined as an arch
through which air and pilgrims pass.
Your penis will be hung up in a bar,
a lewd and leathery baton
No reliquary can hold your bones,
but still I am thinking of tht beach,
and those men, too many for the job,
staring, with their hands in their pockets,
at an enormity.
