Whale Song

Years ago I adapted a poem by Mary Oliver into a song. I’m not much of a poetry guy usually, although I’ve written my fair share. I have some earnestly horrific journals from college that … well … let’s just say no longer fill me with joy and should be shredded and composted. But Mary Oliver was one of Diane’s favorites, and from time to time she’d want to share one with me, looking at me with that hopeful face that I find hard to resist, and among those occasional readings, I was introduced to the poem Bone. 

Diane had brought it up the night before. We were having dinner with some visiting colleagues, and one of the architects shared his interest in the Pleistocene Epoch and the study of fossils. One of the perverse silver linings of climate change and the melting of the permafrost is that paleontologists are discovering and learning more and more about mastodons, mammoths, saber-tooths, sloths, and the rest of the cast of Ice Age. Diane noted that it reminded her of Mary Oliver’s poem Bone, in which the poet describes finding the ear bone of a pilot whale on the beach one early morning. For those who live along the coast, this is apparently not that rare, as this particular bone is very hard and often the last piece of the animal to disappear into the ether. The bone was from an animal that may have died hundreds of years before.  It was tiny. It would have been invisible, buried deep inside the whale “in a house of hearing.” And she used it as a segue to ponder the nature of the soul—“so hard, so necessary … yet almost nothing.” 

And I loved the imagery of a person strolling along the beach in the “pale, pink morning light,” inspired to think those thoughts we can sometimes be prone to think, about eternity, about our place in the enormity of time and space. Oceans can send you to that place. It’s so big and powerful and alive. Oceans, mountains, rivers, even the wide open prairie at dusk, the forest in a rainstorm, or the chaotic silence of a January snowstorm—they inspire us to think about the larger things, those that we find precious, those that we find magical. And then someone like Mary Oliver comes along to put that inclination into words. Thank you for that, Mary. Rest in peace.

Bone

by Mary Oliver 

(from Why I Wake Early, 2004)

1.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out

what the soul is,

and where hidden,

and what shape

and so, last week,

when I found on the beach

the ear bone

of a pilot whale that may have died

hundreds of years ago, I thought

maybe I was close

to discovering something

for the ear bone

2.

is the portion that lasts longest

in any of us, man or whale; shaped

like a squat spoon

with a pink scoop where

once, in the lively swimmer’s head,

it joined its two sisters

in the house of hearing,

it was only

two inches long

and thought: the soul

might be like this

so hard, so necessary

3.

yet almost nothing.

Beside me

the gray sea

was opening and shutting its wave-doors,

unfolding over and over

its time-ridiculing roar;

I looked but I couldn’t see anything

through its dark-knit glare;

yet don’t we all know, the golden sand

is there at the bottom,

though our eyes have never seen it,

nor can our hands ever catch it

4.

lest we would sift it down

into fractions, and facts

certainties

and what the soul is, also

I believe I will never quite know.

Though I play at the edges of knowing,

truly I know

our part is not knowing,

but looking, and touching, and loving,

which is the way I walked on,

softly,

through the pale-pink morning light.