Nothing says loneliness like building a boy from sticks,
posing him pin-jointed in angles of sleep or embrace,
carving his face from heartwood and holding it up
to a candle flame, saying, hello old chum or dear son.
When Geppetto went into the whale, sliding across
the broad grating tongue till he wedged beneath
its massive heart beating like black red thunder,
did he know where he was, what had happened?
When he lit his small fire and found himself inside
the cavern of the whale’s body, gothic ribs arching
overhead and a slurry of saltwater and fish chum
at his feet, the loneliness must have felt like home.
James Bartley, the story goes, fell overboard off
the Falklands coast in 1891, floundered into the belly
of a sperm whale, which his crewmates slaughtered
and opened two days later, finding Bartley alive,
half conscious, blind and bleached from stomach acid.
It’s only a legend, of course: no records, no Bartley listed
in the ship’s log. And who could survive the bone-breaking
esophagus, saltwater asphyxiation, toxic gastric juices?
What is true? Heart, tongue, fire. All of us are Jonah,
James, Geppetto, swallowed alive by gloom, then spewed
back again into eternity’s long forever nothingness.
Best we can do is build fire in the belly of darkness.
–
Christopher Todd Anderson is an associate professor of English at Pittsburg State University. His poems have appeared in numerous national literary magazines, including River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Wisconsin Review, Tar River Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner. A 2018 Pushcart Prize recipient for poetry, Anderson has also published scholarly articles on images of garbage and waste in American poetry and on the film WALL-E.