Whale Watching
This seascape, with its deep shades of ultramarine,
bluer than Muddy Waters, is as uncanny
as the landscape we are leaving behind, chugging
out of Reykjavik in high summer with our talk
of that Great American Novel, Ahab and his quest,
so much madder than ours, the captain’s dark thoughts
bent on murderous revenge.
Our limbs are still mercifully intact and
our ambitions are more modest: this day
on the ocean, our steady passage through
the intensity of the sea’s crisp palette,
and the capturing of memories, framed by
the lenses of our field glasses, of the mightiest beast
our eyes will ever behold.