Body Continuous

by Victoria Korth

I love the humpback’s song,
her care for her young taught to find food
in the surf through play, and later
in bubble nets on Stellwagen Bank.
I love her ungendered names:
Salt, Spinaker, Lune,
primacy etched in flukes’ markings,
her family tree held closely
by scientists and detanglers, private
as her positions in and through the Gulf of Maine.
I love whale-people who watch obsessively from Race Point,
converse without moving their binoculars
off the horizon, read plumes, record each sighting.
I love to feel I know whale-effort,
an instant of one trillionth of her mass.
But fear my love is rather love for those whose love is effort.
Massive head, crusty skin and razor fine baleen plate,
fins like wings for circumnavigation, pole to pole,
are not these legs, weighted heart so seized,
as if each inch of flesh is solid as the planet.
She is all outside myself.
Yet in the shallows I sense a ghost-track
hiding the unforeseen, a magnetic pairing,
current’s ease, body continuous.