Pilot whales beach their black bodies
\non sandbars off the Cape. With my grandparents<\/p>\n
I watched them dying on TV in August,
\nwhen tourist children poured more sun<\/p>\n
onto the whale fins with neon play-buckets
\nof warm water, tried to push them out,<\/p>\n
push them out past the stripes of gleaming
\nsnails but they kept coming in again at high tide,<\/p>\n
and when water bled away from their heavy forms
\nthey cried soft dog noises that humans also<\/p>\n
make from a place in the ribs that opens
\na chamber, a cathedral, where an echo<\/p>\n
echoes and loses itself. Ear training involves singing,
\nknowing how to sing a series of pitches in your mind<\/p>\n
before your mouth finds strange leaps
\nin sound with the tongue and throat, not a melody,<\/p>\n
these facts to learn. Stuff your ears with wax,
\nfall asleep on the deck of a motorboat<\/p>\n
near the jagged granite rocks people arrange
\ninto jetties to guide the land. Guidance, what, people say,<\/p>\n
some women need and they had it coming. I remember
\nbraiding the hair of a friend\u2019s doll by myself in her bedroom,<\/p>\n
and the sheer curtains whipped rain against the walls
\nand then the tornado sirens howled, first one,<\/p>\n
then another, suburban wolves, as all the nearby
\ntowns called and called to one another.<\/p>\n
The babysitter downstairs told me I heard
\nnothing and flipped the radio on, piled flashlights<\/p>\n
near her sandals, so my friend and I checked<\/p>\n
the basement but yellow clumps of sewage<\/p>\n
had backed up to the bottom step, strewn flowers
\nof toilet paper to clog the wheels of the pool table<\/p>\n
so upstairs we made sure the cathedral windows
\nopened to trees, close to the house, so dark,<\/p>\n
and we sat listening, knowing from school that when
\nthe storm comes, you have to let the wind in.<\/p>\n
Pilot whales beach their black bodies on sandbars off the Cape. With my grandparents I watched them dying on TV in August, when tourist children poured more sun onto the whale fins with neon play-buckets of warm water, tried to push them out, push them out past the stripes of gleaming snails but they kept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[25],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-1gr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4863"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10287,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4863\/revisions\/10287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}