When A Whale Falls

Dylan asked me to write this:

She dies without applause,

Without the warm hush of sky,

Without the currents of wind to carry her name.

Forty tons of salt-soaked history

Slip through water

Like a cathedral sinking into silence.

The descent lasts hours,

Each meter a slow exhale

Into a dark that has no ceiling,

No horizon,

No eyes to witness.

Only the pressure of oceans,

The cold pressing into flesh,

The inevitability of gravity.

When she lands, the seabed trembles slightly,

A soft thud against the black,

And the world shifts around her stillness.

The myxins with their gnawing tongues,

Sharks aroused by her scent,

Octopi that unfold like ink in reverse,

Ripping muscle from memory,

Swallowing the map of her body

Until only skeleton remains.

This is hunger.

This is devotion.

And when the flesh is gone,

Death blooms tiny root-like worms,

Threading through marrow,

Digging deep into her bones,

Dissolving centuries of fat into sustenance.

They flower where she once breathed,

Plumes of bacteria rising like smoke,

Feeding worms, crabs, and crustaceans,

The world’s predators and prey

All feeding on the marrow of a dead goddess.

A single whale,

A single death,

Becomes a creator.

A God.

A universe.

A hundred species orbit her remains

For decades,

And still, deep in the unlit trenches,

She is known,

She is worshiped,

She is remembered,

In the silent architecture of skeleton.

No one sees it,

No one writes elegies in ink,

But in the dark,

Death is not an end.

It is a cathedral,

A crucible,

A library of feeding and breathing

And endless becoming.

And when you think of it—

The slow, silent fall,

The slow, gaping, intimate feeding—

You understand:

Even death can harbor worlds.

Even death can harbor life.