Dear whale-tribe,
I give dispatch from waterbound Lubeck; finally made it all the way downeast into the bright briny borders of this count(r)y. It turns out that for all those years it was only ever a three-hour bikeride away.
Our family is cleaning its hearts! Flensing foot-thick fat-jackets off to expose mammalian circulatory systems: feel the love expand! our hands all together in a big wooden vat massaging a caseworth of sperm! our dirty brig & its high clean sails!
Today the 31st birthday of one of our dead; ten years in the grave this November, I hope some one of you will read this today and think of him.
Yesterday the degré zéro birthday in NYC of one Anatole Naphtali Tober.
I love you all
& you are with me

MR HUNTER'S GRAVE

"God keeps His eye on those that are dead and buried the same as He does on those that are alive and walking. When the time comes the dead are raised, He won't need any directions where they're lying. Their bones may be turned to dust, and weeds may be growing out of their dust, but they aren't lost. He knows where they are; He knows the exact whereabouts of every speck of dust of every one of them. Stones rot the same as bones rot, and nothing endures but the spirit."

"'Several men from Sandy Ground fought in the Civil War,' Mr. Hunter said, 'and one of them was Samuel Fish.'"

"Preserved Fish is in vault No. 75 in the century-old New York City Marble Cemetery at Second St. near Second Ave. wherein lie many of oldtime New York's families: Chesebrough, Lenox, Ogden, Allen, Bogardus, Van Alen, Griswold, Kip, Taylor, Stanton, Webb. A marble slab marks "PRESERVED FISH'S VAULT" where five others (only one other Fish. Mary) are buried. On the Fish plot there also rises a marble monument to Captain H. Leslie, a New Bedford fellow-whaler, who is also in vault No. 75."

"Preserved is a venerable Quaker name. "

A pod of minkes off Quoddy Head

echolocating into ports of call, corpse-fed blueberries steeping in the tub of oil, saltcod lard mash sea-vapor in our cold noses.
sunk by a whale we become enfeebled and draw lots. first attempt by lashing and stabbing with shark vertebra cane leaves only red marks. strangulation with a strip of baleen leads to consumption of remains with a floating piece of weed. gnawing on bones lasts for subsequent weeks.
it is now possible to imagine centuries of hilltop whale yoga, shrouded in skinny anatomy, scrimshaw cutouts rolling downhill.

my heart like a strawberry crushed up in against the ribby heat of my sternum from inside
or like a paste trying to be a vapor, bits of abhogi bone-sherds ground in
like the shape of my arm