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and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.
Where is my testing-tree?
Give me back my stones.Childhood, semi-wild terrain, a lost trail and special tree pull Kunitz back to
test himself within America’s scarred history.
His task, he says, is making life into legend, in poems from which “fire breaks
each time you turn to them.” Both fire and legend break from “The Wellfleet
Whale,” about a stranded finback.
You have your language too,
an eerie medley of clicks
and hoots and trills,
location-notes and love calls,
whistles and grunts. Occasionally,
it ’s like furniture being smashed,
or the creaking of a mossy door,
sounds that all melt into a liquid
song with endless variations.That eerie song or language does not much interest Japan, which every year
kills fifty humpbacks with their incredible songs, plus hundreds of whales from
other species, for “scientific research”—never mind that they find their way to
festive tables.
Since the Lord God challenged Job’s pettiness in face of Leviathan, the ques-
tion is, Can we grasp Creation’s hugest creature? And since Roger Payne ’s
discovery in the late 1960s, what of their singing? Is it “like furniture being
smashed”? Kunitz hedges, calling it also “a sorrow without name,” “both
more / and less than human.”
Years after what happened off Cape Cod in 1966, he does justice to it. The
sixty-three-foot whale had “coasted into sight,”
All afternoon you swam
tirelessly round the bay,
with such an easy motion...
And when you bounded into air,
slapping your flukes,
we thrilled to look upon
pure energy incarnate
as nobility of form.“That night we watched you / swimming in the moon,” and then a single line
caps the tragedy: “At dawn we found you stranded on the rocks.”
Trouble starts as men come running, “schoolgirls in yellow halters,” a house-