‘A Whale Is a Whale’: A Poem After Ogden Nash, by Jonathan Bear

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A Whale is a Whale

—after Ogden Nash

While laughing aloud at Ogden’s smart rhymes,
I was struck by a way to interpret his lines.
Though Nash’s reputation was not as a Buddhist,
An ode to signlessness might be the truest.

We see how the author takes pains to adjure
That things are what they are, and of this we are sure.
That they’re not what they’re not, we ordinarily admit,
And calling them otherwise won’t change things a bit.

And though all speech, in truth, is made up of signs,
We might with reality keep roughly aligned,
And not wax too eloquent in our description,
Lest preposterous analogies give poor Nash a conniption.

Towards grand embellishment let us forgo our attraction;
Perhaps simple description is our best course of action!
This may be why haiku, though many find them terse,
Towards metaphor and simile are highly averse.

If words were reality, as Sawaki said in his turn,
We’d saying saki get drunk, and saying fire be burned.
That’s not how it is. Yet poems we still read,
Searching for beauty in words, speech and deed.

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Jonathan Bear is psychiatrist who lives in rural North Florida.