Other poets love to sing praises.
They gush over the gentle eyes of antelopes.
They write about beautiful birds that never land.
Me? I’m going to celebrate something far less heavenly — a tail.
Let’s talk about the tail of a full‑size sperm whale.
It starts where the whale’s body narrows down to roughly the width of a man’s torso.
Just its upper surface alone covers at least fifty square feet.
The thick, rounded base of the tail spreads out into two wide, stiff, flat lobes, called flukes.
These lobes thin gradually, until they are less than an inch thick at the outer edges.
Near the center joint, the two flukes overlap just a little.
Then they fan out sideways like wings, leaving a broad gap between them.
Few living things have curves as perfectly shaped as the sweeping, crescent edges of a whale’s flukes.
When a grown whale spreads its tail all the way open, it stretches more than twenty feet from tip to tip.
The whole tail looks like a dense mat of tightly woven tendons.
But cut into it, and you will find three separate layers: top, middle, and bottom.
The fibres in the top and bottom layers run long and horizontally.
The middle layer is made of very short fibres, criss‑crossing between the outer two.
This three‑layer build is a huge part of what gives the tail its brutal power.
If you have ever studied old Roman stone walls, this middle layer will feel familiar.
Those ancient ruins have thin tile rows set between stone blocks.
That alternating pattern is what makes the masonry so incredibly strong.
Nature used that same trick for the whale’s tail.
And that built‑in tendon strength is still not all.
The leviathan’s entire body is wrapped in criss‑crossing muscle strands.
These fibres run down both sides of its torso, all the way into the flukes.
They merge seamlessly into the tail lobes, adding even more force.
All the endless power of the whole whale seems to collect right here.
If anything on earth could smash matter to nothing, this tail would be it.
Its unbelievable strength does not make its movements clumsy.
You get soft, easy fluid movement, housed inside pure titanic power.
Actually, that raw power is what makes its motions so breathtaking.
True strength never ruins beauty or harmony.
More often than not, it creates beauty.
Every truly awe‑inspiring beautiful thing draws magic from strength.
Imagine the carved statue of Hercules.
If you took away all those bulging, straining tendons bursting under marble, all its charm would vanish.
When the devoted Eckerman pulled the linen sheet off Goethe’s dead body, he was stunned by his massive chest.
It looked like a Roman victory arch carved in flesh.
Even Michelangelo painted God the Father with solid, sturdy muscle.
Think of those soft, curly Italian paintings of Christ.
They show gentle divine love, but no real muscle.
There is no power there, only quiet feminine submission and endurance.
Those are the virtues his teachings talk about, but you cannot feel force in those pictures.
The whale’s tail is springy and supple.
Whether it is playing, swimming hard, or lashing out in anger, every bend is unbelievably graceful.
No fairy’s delicate wrist could move more beautifully.
The tail has five main distinct moves.
It acts as a fin for swimming forward.
It works like a heavy war club during fights.
It does the slow sweeping motion.
It slaps the water, what sailors call lobtailing.
And it rears its flukes straight up into the air, known as peaking flukes.
First, for swimming.
The whale’s tail sits flat horizontal.
It works completely differently from every other sea creature’s tail.
It does not wiggle back and forth.
Wiggling is a mark of weakness, in people and in fish alike.
This tail is the whale’s only engine.
It curls forward under its body, then snaps hard backward.
That snap shoots the huge beast darting and leaping through the water when it swims at full speed.
Its side fins are only for steering.
Second, fighting.
Here is an interesting detail.
Sperm whales fight other sperm whales using only their heads and jaws.
But when they battle humans, they mostly attack with their tails, almost dismissively.
To hit a boat, it yanks its flukes away, then strikes with the rebound snap.
If the swing lands through open air, nothing can stop it.
No boat frame, no human bones can survive that blow.
Your only hope is to get out of the way.
If the strike comes sideways through water, things are different.
Whale boats are light and flexible.
Usually you end up with cracked timbers, a split plank or two, a gash along the hull.
Fishermen see these underwater side hits all the time.
They treat them like minor trouble.
Someone rips off a coat, and stuffs the hole shut.
Third, sweeping.
I cannot prove this, but I believe the whale’s sense of touch lives mostly in its tail.
Its sensitivity rivals the fine, careful feel of an elephant’s trunk.
You see this best in the sweeping movement.
The whale moves those enormous flukes slowly and softly across the ocean surface, gentle as a shy young girl.
If its tail brushes so much as a sailor’s whisker — that sailor is done for, whiskers and all.
Think about how soft that first light touch is.
If this tail could grab and hold things, I would think right away of that old story about Darmonodes’ elephant.
That elephant loved flower markets.
It would bow politely and hand bouquets to young women, then caress their waists.
It is a shame whales do not have that grasping ability in their tails.
I heard about another elephant too.
When wounded in battle, it curled its trunk and pulled spears right out of its own body.
Fourth, lobtailing.
You can come upon a whale far out at open sea.
It will drop its huge, dignified bearing.
It acts like a playful kitten, treating the whole ocean as if it were a cozy hearth.
Even playing, you can see its power.
It flings those wide tail lobes high into the air.
Then slams them down against the sea.
The thunder‑like crash echoes for miles.
You could swear a massive cannon just fired.
If you glance over at its blowhole, you will see a small puff of mist.
For a split second you might mistake it for cannon smoke.
Fifth, peaking flukes.
When a whale floats normally, its tail lobes sit well below its back.
They are completely hidden under water.
But when it is about to dive deep, it heaves its full tail plus thirty feet of its body straight upward into open air.
The huge flukes shake there for one moment.
Then they shoot down and vanish beneath the waves.
Aside from the magnificent full breach I will describe elsewhere, seeing a whale raise its flukes high is one of the most spectacular sights in all of nature.
That giant tail seems to claw wildly toward heaven, rising up out of endless dark ocean depths.
I have dreamed of mighty Satan, thrusting his enormous tormented claws out of hell’s fiery sea.
What you feel depends entirely on your own mood.
If your mind leans toward Dante, you will think of devils.
If you read Isaiah, you will picture archangels.
Once, I stood in my ship’s crow’s nest.
Sunrise dyed sky and ocean blood‑red.
Off in the east I saw a whole pod of whales.
All of them faced toward the rising sun.
At the same instant, they lifted their flukes and trembled there together.
To me, it looked like the most majestic act of worship anyone had ever witnessed.
Even in Persia, home of the fire‑worshippers, you would not see anything grander.
Ptolemy Philopater once wrote about African elephants.
In that moment, I thought the same about whales.
I said they were the most devout creatures alive.
King Juba wrote that ancient war elephants would greet dawn, lifting their trunks high in total, solemn silence.
I compare whale tails and elephant trunks here.
Do not take this to mean those two body parts are equal.
And certainly do not think the animals rank anywhere near each other.
The strongest elephant is just a small terrier dog next to a sperm whale.
Beside a whale’s tail, an elephant’s trunk is no thicker than a lily stem.
The hardest smack an elephant’s trunk can deliver feels like a light tap from a fan.
Compare that to the crushing, smashing force of sperm whale flukes.
Whalers have watched these tails hurl entire boats, oars and crew and all, flying through the air.
Much like a street performer tossing balls.
*Comparing overall size between whales and elephants is ridiculous.
An elephant is to a whale roughly what a dog is to an elephant.
Still, they share a few odd similarities.
One of those is their spout.
Everyone knows elephants suck water or dust into their trunks.
Then they lift it and spray it out in a jet.
The more I study this tremendous tail, the more I wish I could put its wonder into words.
Sometimes it makes strange gestures.
Movements graceful enough for a human hand, yet impossible for us to understand.
In big whale pods, these mysterious gestures happen often.
Some old whalers swore they looked like secret Freemason hand signals.
They truly believed whales talked to one another using these motions.
The whale has plenty of other strange body movements, too.
Even the most experienced whalers cannot explain them.
I can cut the whale open.
But I only ever scratch the surface.
I will never truly understand it.
If I cannot even make sense of its tail, how can I understand its head?
How could I ever grasp its face, when it has no face at all?
It is almost as if the whale is saying:
You may see my back, you may see my tail.
But you will never look upon my face.
And honestly, I cannot even fully read its back.
It can hint all it wants about some hidden face.
I will say it again.
The whale has no face.