Freighting the Whale I: Invocations

SONG FOR ORAN

Yes, this work reflects your ocean
In pocket fjords of blue - yet more
Than ghosting mirrors, you sail each
Toward the next, your smile the roller
Which collapses every next shore.
The poems proceed from me to you
To dream our child, his voice not ours
But some fourth choir of one, this dark
Book I slowly fill - Or rather,
That nook your song coffined sailing
To frozen hell and back. Your tale
I ride down every page, or it
Fins me - Never to end, nor quite
Say; not to propound or console
But freight the whale from pole to pole.

***

Suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity rising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.

- Melville, Moby Dick

***


... Far had he roam'd,
With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam'd
Above, around, and at his feet; save things
More dead than Morpheus' imaginings:
Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large
Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;
Rudders that for a hundred years had lost
The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss'd
With long-forgotten story, and wherein
No reveller had ever dipp'd a chin
But those of Saturn's vintage; mouldering scrolls,
Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls
Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude
In ponderous stone, developing the mood
Of ancient Nox;-then skeletons of man,
Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,
And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw
Of nameless monster. A cold leaden awe
These secrets struck into him; and unless
Dian had chased away that heaviness,
He might have died: but now, with cheered feel,
He onward kept; wooing these thoughts to steal
About the labyrinth in his soul of love.

Keats Endymion


***

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.

- Ariel, Shakespeare Tempest