Watch

By Greg Miller b. 1957 Greg Miller

We pass the straits of the Cape

where grazing whales gather,

though they’re not, I’m told, social

creatures by nature.

Alice asks how they can sleep

if they must think to breathe.

Cranial hemispheres wink and wake

and alternate,

so whales are half-awake

and half-asleep, balanced between each

of our states

through dive and breach.

Once on the kitchen wall

of a dune shack I saw,

like a headdress,

the baleen of a whale—

frayed filaments

run from a thin,

curled, rib-like bone:

sieves for the sea.

Like this sickle-moon fin

“negatively buoyant”

I sink in sleep,

but end, I think, where I begin.

Following one as it leaves

two other whales we see

suddenly not what we’re heading for

but the asymmetrically

colored snout of a fin whale

as it rises parallel

within a stone’s

throw of the boat,

the great eye set back

water crashing rushing

to let me see where it ought to be.

I lose track,

the mottled chin’s marble

veined, swirling

through its green veil, which

the top jaw slits.

And then, that’s it,

I think. Nights I’m thrown

upright from my rest. Brine

thumps my chest.

Source: Watch (The University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Biography

Poet Greg Miller grew up in Kentucky and studied French literature and political science at Vanderbilt University. He earned an MA in English and creative writing from Stanford University and a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Miller is the author of the collections Iron Wheel (1998), Rib Cage (2001), Mississippi Sudan (2006), and Watch (2009). Wide-ranging in his interests, he has written on southern . . .

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