The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: As If This Did Not Happen Every Day by Paula Lambert

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This Place, Too, a Loss: Blue Whale

A blue whale’s heart, they say,
is big as a Volkswagen Beetle. Because
folks on land, I guess, have no frame of reference
but the cars that carry us through our pitiful days,
place to place, mile after mile,
incessantly searching for something bigger and better we can call home.

The beat of a blue whale’s heart, they say,
can be heard over two miles away, though it’s not clear to me
who’s listening—a boat, maybe, filled with men
weighed down by sonar devices and plastic coolers,
men with hearts small as a fist—
women, too, maybe, and other folk dreaming
of swimming inside a blue whale’s ventricle because

they say that, too, you know,
that the blue whale’s arteries are a tunnel
big enough to contain us,
as if that heart, big as a car, beating eight times a minute
and loud enough for most anyone’s god to hear, wouldn’t burst
our skulls from the eardrums out, drown us in the blood
she’s pumping—or trying to, we the clot
most likely to kill her as we breaststroke leisurely
toward the overworked chambers
of her heavy, heavy heart, thinking

this might be it at last. This might be home,
or at least a place we can stay for a while, flip, maybe,
or turn into an Airbnb, somebody else’s getaway,
somebody else’s home away from home, somebody else’s
chance to forget about everything, for a while, till they leave
their two-star review, of course: seemed spacious

but not much of a view, and be forewarned
there was some kind of really loud thumping sound
we couldn’t find the source of, somebody needs to look into that.
would not recommend, and it seems best for you
to call this place, too, a loss, sell it for what you can get
or maybe just foreclose, maybe just move on. 

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