How I Managed The Skeleton From A Blue Whale

I found him,
One morning slowly pushed to shore
With a buoyant heart collapsed within his corpse,
This sagging mouth hung, like the beaten tongue of an old shoe.
Slack jawed, stretched, eighty feet, from tail to tooth.
And how the sea level must have plunged,
As does a glass of water without ice cubes,
When that creature was plucked from the glory of the deep, the sanctity of the ancients.
This monster of unfathomable fathoms,
Asleep on the edge of town.
Beside him my existence shrunk,
Flush in his rot,
The smell of gulls collecting interest,
Circling, thrashing, at these two sad eyes, reluctant,
Open and dismal.
His sheer abundance,
Supernatural in the Sea,
Bankrupt on land,
Consumed by the same gravity as me.
Oh how things this massive can really happen.
Worlds folded into worlds, celestial both up and down.

Up onto that colossus I ascended.
With two knives, I dug my way up into his side,
Stood in soft decomposition,
Dilapidated, absorbed of the entire Pacific, he felt like a sponge.
In the blowhole gnats swarmed,
Like eagles at the mountaintop,
An almost victory, but I still mourned.
Defeat would be to not have preserved that Beast’s legacy,
And remove from him his bones, this porcelain offering beneath.

Later machines arrived to harvest what I could not,
As did a crowd who at the sight of him prayed to God.
There was nothing sadder than to witness a great Beast die,
Bones tied to a flatbed truck, that skulking skull, lay like an airplane,
Ribs jutting, clutched, interweaving together like a fist, larger than any on this planet,
And scientists wiped the blood from their glasses,
While I stayed, in that sacrificial heat,
Rightfully burying below red sand his leftover meat.
Back into the Crust of the Earth, oh if I hadn’t found him already deceased.