Watch

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.