A Poet's Tribute To His Adopted Whale

After following the old whale's impressive antics and migrations up and down the Atlantic, this proud papa was inspired to perform a rollicking tribute to his humpback progeny.

We're talking humpbacks, not greenbacks,
but I'm still sitting fat
packing only his flukes — biggest fingerprint
you ever saw high-fiving me
or should I say "two-Hi-ing" me, out of the gray
Atlantic — Sable Island to Stellwagen Bank
to New York Bight — or maybe out of the blue
Caribbean, off Puerto Rico, off Haiti,
off the Grenadines.

He moves around a bit,
this ubiquitous humpback, this quasi-
Quasimodo, I suppose, of his pod,
after some three-story-tall titanic
propeller or snaggle-toothed denizen
out of Davy Jones's Locker
chewed his dorsal fin off his back, and left him
with his anatomical namesake — you guessed it — Stub!

Not Neptune, Rigadoon, Tom Cruise, Sing-A-Tune,
not even peg-legged Blackbeard or Captain Hook,
but just plain old monosyllabic-ugly Stub,
like the nickname of a Polish-Italian hit man,
Stub Podgurski, Stub Lagunowski, Stub Mitolio —
monikers from my hometown phone book! Stub, like Bub
or rub-a-dub-dub, like grub, or tub-o-lard butt,
but beauty, we know, is only blubber-deep,
and even if Charlie-the-talking-tuna were picked
by Starkist, he'd still be just a fish!

Stub, on the other fin, is tops,
to paraphrase his adoption papers,
"... at playing tag and torpedo
with the whale-watching boats." It's Stub!
The humpback ham-atola! The leviathan
lampooner! The coxswain lob-tailing, stand-up comic
of the deep — the salt-water Sinbad, Don Rickles,
Rodney Dangerfield and breaching John Belushi
reincarnated! All roly-polied into one!

No — wait! It's the B.B. King of the Barnacle-Blues!
You bet, me buckos, this galley-hound Elvis-the-Pelvis, this
Sinatra-of-the-sea, can sing! We're talking ocean virtuoso,
not babbling Brooks, and certainly not Whalon!
We're talking SEA-W gods, The Hank-meister,
The Hag, and, yes, Johnny The-Man-In-Black Cash,
all of whom drank like nuns next to Stub.

We're talking M.C. (Marine-Cool) Hammer-
The-Humpback-Jammer, who, rumor has it,
raps in rhymed iambs. My main man,
Stub, the sea-leb of all sea-levs,
and let's see Michael Jackson moonwalk water!

Which is why I carry this deep-sounder,
page-to-glassined-page, baleen-face-to-bearded-face
with old J.C. — talk about your Heavies! Talk about
your family-at-large! Talk about your Big Bang
and the big splash I make
with strangers when I point to Stub and say
"DAT SA MA BOY!"