It seemed a furtive magic—
sun ricocheting off cresting waves near
Stillwater Cove, the soft rock cliffs
of sandstone and clay, the wind-tilted
cypress trees leaning toward
the blue Pacific—and it was only you
that saw the whales. A migrating pod
of gray whales going northward new
calves in tow, shooting a spray of frothy
expelled water from their blowholes
and making a show of breaching
in the clear spring air off the coastline.
We’d whine that we never
caught a glimpse of a slick back or tail slap,
nary a spyhopping head raised
above the swirling surface. Too young
to look outward for long, we’d lower
our eyes toward what lived small,
the alligator lizard in the coyote bush,
the bracken fern, the orange monkey
flower, the beach fly, the earwig, the tick.
It was your trick, always a whale
as soon as our heads went down, had
to have been a lie, they’d come up
while we zeroed in on Mexican sage
or the monarch. Distracted
by the evidence of life at our feet,
we had no time for the waiting
that was required. To watch
the waves until the whales surfaced
seemed a maddening task. Now, I am
in the inland air that smells of smoke
and gasoline, the trees blown leafless by
wind. Could you refuse me if I asked you
to point again at the horizon, to tell me
something was worth waiting for?•
Ada Limón is the author of Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, Sharks in the Rivers, Bright Dead Things, The Carrying, The Hurting Kind, and Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Her two children’s picture books are And, Too, the Fox and In Praise of Mystery, and she is the editor of the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. She received a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship and served as a two-time poet laureate of the United States from 2022 to 2025. Limón lives in Sonoma, where she is originally from.
