(By Weight on Earth)
Blue whale crushed in Newfoundland pack ice
90 metric ton, 350 bone skeleton
Pressure of pack-ice against the living whale
By weight on earth, the largest creature
With a heart like a WW1 bunker,
big, arterial, and bloody.
The ice erodes to slob pancakes,
and retreats.
With the tidal flow, its rock scraped hide ripples
like a deflated wine bladder,
beached and sun-bleached.
5 days to dismember
Two 18 wheeler transport trucks to move
A Fossil wrist watch is on exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum
and still smells of rotting blue whale.
As a timepiece it once hung
from researcher Mark Engstrom’s wrist
as he sliced and separated bone from flesh and blubber
on a greasy beach in Trout River, or was it Rocky Harbour?
No matter, for a time the place was somewhere separate
from scientists and curators
When the whale was something else, all together,
Articulated, albeit dead.
9 months to compost the bones
15 metre containers filled with cow manure and sawdust
The star of the show.
The skeleton of the blue whale hangs from the gallery ceiling,
light, clean white and airy, but dead heavy.
For the pose, a mammalian back arch, not the fishy kind,
on its way somewhere -
(using dead reckoning
like James Caird’s
small boat journey -
Elephant Island to South Georgia
in the southern Atlantic ocean,
800 miles)
- like it’s just swimming through
its own epic return
back through the freshwater lochs of Hamilton
eastbound for salty Newfoundland.
(Bryan Manning)