Our trajectory is unknowable, you tell me: the planet
corkscrews around the Sun, sure,
but the Sun corkscrews around a black hole at
the heart of the Milky Way,
and our whole galaxy travels on some mysterious,
incalculable vector. But sister, I saw a photograph
in which two whale sharks were brought to
heel by men in simple reed boats just
off the coast of the Philippines. All that they had
to do was often feed
the sharks many gallons of grocery-store frozen
shrimp, poured from plastic garbage bags into
their yawning six-foot maws to portside.
Gargantuan, sure, but still
as obedient and eager for food as backyard
squirrels. I remembered a grainy
internet video—I saw it probably seven or
eight years back—in which
a captured whale shark was winched
ashore in Madagascar, or
maybe it was the Philippines again—no matter—
the thing still had life left
in it and struggled to breathe while a crowd of
people gathered around—there were
women carrying babies, girls holding baskets atop
their heads—and then the
men came with a long slender blade and sliced clean
through the whale’s spine, vivisected it
right there on the dock, and the onlookers stood there quite
unfazed—I remember
being shocked at the effortlessness of the cut,
the pinkness of the whale’s blood,
and the boredom in the onlookers’ eyes. Our father
took us down to San Antonio
on one of his business trips there when we were five
or six—I think
you were probably too young to
remember it—
it was when you and I saw the ocean for the first
time. We drove down to the Gulf
of Mexico, and we saw waves breaking
out near the horizon in pale
sunlight. I kept scanning for a dorsal
fin off beyond
the breakers, thinking that I might spot one—
sandy brown, mottled with
cream spots and glistening—so that I might be able to
say to you, pointing, “look,
sister, there is a whale shark!” Years
later we would learn
that he traveled down to San Antonio so
frequently because he was a philanderer. As
a child I believed that whale sharks
crisscrossed the ocean following
paths that we couldn’t fathom, that
their concerns were somehow
beyond our comprehension, but then
Keppler pinned down
the shape of the Earth’s orbit over four
hundred years ago,
and the lives of ancient sea
titans are sundered
effortlessly
by men with indifferent faces.