Communion
It is our need of those quiet moments—the white space—but we would never call it that.
The same way that we would never say aloud that the memory of a bowhead mother is
long, and she will remember exactly where her young calf was taken during a fall
migration. As she travels southward, sorrowbent in deep ocean waters; a scientist off
the coast of St. Lawrence Island captures her symphony by hydrophone. This requiem
later played in a museum: an exhibit of whale song: a place for weeping. The visitors, all
unable to translate a sudden sense of loss. It was not the young man’s intention
to kill such a young whale. He was told that a whale will give itself. You will know,
they all told him, the driver of the boat encouraging him to strike. It was his first time to
throw a harpoon. And so, when the calf surfaced, unaware of such things as man, he did.