Whale Song
She greeted the sun at dawn. She stuck out her tongue to taste the wave’s salty spray. A lone seagull sailed toward the sun. Beach walking her feet squished leaving footprints in the soft wet sand which vanished in a succession of waves.
Ahead of her loomed jagged rocks which looked like black shark’s teeth. They Defied the ocean which would erode them carrying their minerals back into the ocean. She climbed up the barnacle covered rocks feeling the barnacles stick against her bare feet.
Crouching she looked down into a tide pool. There were limpets tiny brown shelled saucers. A rock crab scuttled sideways hiding in a crack in the rocks. She gazed at her freckled face reflected in the translucent water of the pool. Her image shimmered ghost like, superimposed on the small ecosystem of the tide pool.
She wondered where she fit in the ecosystem or for that matter the human system. She wished she had been born a humpback whale her voice carrying over hundreds of miles to a lover in a far corner of the ocean in a song of love making.
She stood up on the rocks stretching her aching back. She looked out towards the north end of Saco Bay. There hovering over the ocean was a huge rain cloud with tendrils of mist and rain hanging down toward the ocean. The tendrils of rain glowed golden in the sunlight. The gold was mixed with grey and it looked like a benevolent ocean spirit bringing cool refreshment to the people of Prout’s neck.
Later one night she stood on the beach looking southeast across the bay at Wood Island lighthouse. Its beam pulsed across the dark Saco Bay. She looked up at the Milky Way where you couldn’t see the stars at the center of the galaxy because they were blocked by the gas, dust, and stars.
She thought how the greatest mystery of the universe was the mystery of consciousness. Like the center of the galaxy, the secrets of the unconscious mind were hidden in the depths. We can’t peer into the mind with a microscope. We only learn the truths of the unconscious indirectly through dreams. She wondered what forces had coalesced in her to make her who she was. She knew she was guided by forces unknown to her which were nevertheless as real as a galaxy or a flower.
That night she dreamed she was with a migrating pod of hump backs lolling in salty depths. They wove their melodies in haunting fugues in the deep blue sea. She nursed a calf, her child. In the human world she was an outcast. Among her cetaceans she was known as mother.
