El Capitán

If the finback whale can communicate
over a distance of five hundred miles
why can’t we get through the three
hundred miles of telephone line; the
tectonic plates of our flesh shifted by
hotspots in the magma make us end
up as mountains or as deep ocean
trenches of emotion, the granite of
El Capitán hard like the edges of our
force fields.

But maybe whales have more
important things to say than we do.
When we talk we communicate
underneath the words of salt, and
layers and layers of it build up slowly
to a millionth of an inch, build up
like a fortress--- not even the end of
the universe can destroy it…

July 26, 1989