Whale Scales
The wind is learning to whistle. It pipes through the rotary washing line while I’m putting extra pegs on the dog’s blanket. The clouds go up so high, this patch of earth seems shrunken. This scale of things in which I am barely a speck is comforting. The wind grows, from a whistle to a whale song. I followed my father along the seawall on a post stormy day and I was about six and the wind was lively but warmish. Wave spray was catching at my legs, the cheeky stuff. Gulls, more gulls than usual, spun overhead, back and forth to the odd shaped rock where my father stopped and waited for me to catch up. The air stank but it wasn’t like the sewage outflow. And there, when my eyes realised what they saw, I learnt the true magnitude of the ocean. A blubberous mountain of whale lay turned and smashed on the shore. And the scale of things opened up; I was barely a speck but I was a speck of this vast creation; and it struck a ceaseless awe in me.