but in this poem nothing dies.

Alone in the poem, I make myself
brave. No—I show brave 
to my body, take both to the ocean. 

Come hurricane, come rip current, 
come toxic algal bloom. 

In March, I drift past the estuary
to watch an eight-foot dolphin 
lap the Mill River 

like a cat pacing a bathtub, 
sick and disoriented. 

Biologists will unspool her empty intestines, 
weigh her gray cerebellum.
She swam a great distance to die 

alone. I’m sorry—I lied. I can’t control 
what lives or dies. I need a place

to stow my brain. To hold 
each moment close as a sand flea
caught in my knuckle hairs.
  
Please, someone—
tell me a poem can coax 

oil from a sea bird’s throat. 
Tell me what to do
with my hands—my hands—

what can my hands do now?

The whales can’t hear each other calling
in the noise-cluttered sea: they beach themselves.
I saw one once— heaved onto the sand with kelp
stuck to its blue-gray skin.
Heavy and immobile

it lay like a great sadness.
And it was hard to breathe with all the stink.
Its elliptical black eyes had stilled, were mostly dry,
and barnacles clustered on its back
like tiny brown volcanoes.

Imagining the other whales, their roving weight,
their blue-black webbing of the deep,
I stopped knowing how to measure my own grief.
And this one, large and dead on the sand
with its unimaginable five-hundred-pound heart.