Freighting the Whale IX: Sea-Room

You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in.

- Melville, Moby Dick

****

As the I Ching sez, it furthers one to cross the great water. Perhaps this is because all the original and great truths can only be found far from shore. Melville again: "Glimpses do you seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so, bitter is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!"

And once to sea, is there any going back to landlocked truths? Here now Nietzsche, from Thus Spake Zarathustra:

"... We argonauts of the ideal, more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often enough shipwrecked and brought to grief, nevertheless dangerously healthy, always healthy again -- it would seem as if, in recompense for it all, that we have a still undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to all countries and corners of the ideal known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity as well as our thirst for possession thereof, have got out of hand--! Alas! that nothing will now any longer satisfy us!"


And Baudelaire, from Flowers of Evil

... Amazing travellers, what noble stories
We read in the deep oceans of your gaze!
Show us your memory's casket, and the glories
Streaming from gems made of stars and rays!
We, too, would roam without a sail or steam,
And to combat the boredom of our jail,
Would stretch, like canvas on our souls, a dream,
Framed in horizons, of the seas you sail.
What have you seen?

- "Voyages III," transl. Roy Campbell

And Ezra Pound, translating from the archaic English ballad, "The Seafarer"

... He hath no heart for harping, nor in ring having
Nor winsomeness to wive, nor world's delight
Nor any whit else save the the wave's lash,
Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth in the water.
... Burgher knows not --
He the prosperous man -- what some perform
Where wandering the widest draweth.
So that but now my heart burst from my breastlock,
My mood mid the mere-flood,
Over the whale's acre, would wander wide.

And Brendan, of as late as yesterday:

WHALE SONG

Sometimes the song
that guides my hand
arrives from way below,
down where the blue
whale swims, his voice
the deepest register
sea's brine organum.
His voice under mine
is terrible, the angel
of Jonah and Ahab
who demands more than
short mornings here afford.
It is brutal and cold like
plainsong in my father's
stone chapel at the
winter solstice, and yet
agelessly sweet like a
blue piano's kiss.
Such sounds hold in words
only vaguely and at
great cost. I would have
that music pass over me
sitting here in my life
with my wife upstairs asleep
and our cat drinking in
the night air of an opened
window:And yet
such trebles shine
because of his bass clef,
each note of merry
surface bliss
resounding in those
deepest tones which
swim only with the whales,
hurling Thor's chords
down a thousand-
fathom trench. Poems
inked there drown
their makers, so beware.
Labor carefully
at the organ-pipes
of that lumbering whale.
Go shore to shore
on the highest wings
of his dark hell-booming bell.

***

Again:

WHALE ORGANUM

When Brendan asks whether they
((the Welscherands)) know God, he
receives a shocking answer: the
monstrous creatures claim to have
seen God with their own eyes. They
explain that when Lucifer rebelled,
they did not take God's side. As
a punishment for their indifference
they were banished from Heaven.
However as they refrained from joining
Lucifer and his companions, they
are not in hell, but a kind of paradise.

- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

The sanctus of my Cape is
a shrieking blue black harrow
between seas of a sort, or
of their wildest shores: an angelic
augment for which no one dare
enter and not emerge a big fish
pruned of belfry peals, humbled,
mauled but good, swimming on in
witness to that sound of blue
which divines not up but down
into a wet wilderness
inside dry mortal hours.
Like the angels Brendan
found on an island paradise
whose loyalty fell short of God
when Lucifer spread black wings
and were thus cast from one heaven
to sing inside a lower one,
a pearl hidden in the ocean
we carol for a life. My Cape
booms with a surf which
resounds in all cathedrals, a
basso, vox-humana organum
you hear whales throat in
liquid groans as they stroll
deep water waves. It was not
refusal of the Lord to love the
big night music more than
white prayers on my knees,
the thump and wallop of that
3-piece band playing Grand
Funk Railroad's "Are You
Ready?" as Iwalked into
my first cotillion
dance. That wild sound
pitched me with a lurch
from one high register(let's
call it a child's faith in God)
down to another where the
sound was boobed a purer blue,
the nth part of heaven which
shares a shore with hell. How
those girls I knew from
school danced to that band
that night, each a flame of
lime or peach or brandied
orange, their bodies ferrying
into Your pass of dread
blue curves. How could I not
grow fond of that night's
dragon wings, too afraid
to mount them fully, content
to watch them fan fires
greater than my former
angels dared to tread, much less sing?
My Cape is one part heaven's hell
a brutal salt mine of deep bliss
which, once harrowed, becomes
hell's heaven, an everlasting pass
of awful, loud and bigassed lucency
whose flukes and spume I am,
a Welscherand of the whale's organum,
plenty of roof for one wild soak
and sufficient floor to raise the next
abbey's water walls -- a song
which may yet swim and swive them all
if I can just survive the thrall.

***

Again:

ORAN'S DEEP

Oran's deep is a dark
cold sea afroth with
the dogs of winter.

This is your totem
tempest, a sea-god's
empire more wild and
true than you can ever
say though here I try.

Beyond the margins
of harbor and ship-lane
mad dragons roam-
Ahab astride his drear bride,
waves like Pyrannees
piling on the spread loins
of Donna and Fran and
Camille. Flipper here has
eyes like scuppers of doom.

These energies are what
drowned the Earth
when the Moon
hauled off, a Pequod
in search of the feral heart
of God. Urgent, restless,
eternal, the seven seas sheet
their abyssal devilries
with a sun-dappled canopy of
smiling blue. Inside every
love's a gaping jaw.

Madness has no definition
we can boat forever:
Be content to sit at the hearth
with this trifle of comfort
while beyond the leaded window
the sirened orcas roar all night.
Each wave collapses in a long
rolling boom then hisses toward
the next wild draw: Pull
up the covers and let those
Furies lull you to sleep.
Oran swims on two hundred
thousand leagues beneath this poem,
one glint of a smile in a crushing dark,
pushing among the splintered
masts and bones for a door.

***

And again:

CETOLOGY

According to magnitude I divide
the whales into three primary BOOKS
(subdivisible into CHAPTERS) and these
shall comprehend the whale, both
small and large.

... Small erections may be furnished
by their first architects; grand ones,
true ones, ever leave the copestone to
posterity. God keep me from ever
completing anything! This whole book
is but a draught - nay but the draught
of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength,
Cash, and Patience!
- Melville, Moby Dick

Who's to complain? Our work is
the whale's, his to ordain and
mordent and spume and sire.
This book is inked in his
cathedral depths, its covers
set with pearls the size of
snowballs, harpoon barbs
and two dozen spilt doubloons.
Each page is another fin
from the catalogue which
pilots every sea and depth
God poured in me a thousand
lives ago. So what's a poem
to Leviathan, whose groaning
organum binds surface and keep
to distant shores? Certainly
not Mon Petit Ephiphanies,
those shiny black buttons
on Ahab's coat that tumbled
to abyss when you jawed
the captain's ribs. Not even
the ship survives to ferry
the tale you bid me write:
It's just me on this savage
leaky casket & a sea
sufficient for God's heart
and the silence that you
leave behind having
thrashed and battered
and hauled ass on down
to doom. "You must have
plenty of sea-room to tell
the truth in," your prior
scholar once wrote:
a big fish to write it, too,
between the covers of
all shores. The work goes
on in your salt scriptorium,
my song today the next
bit of scrimshaw to survive.
That's cetology: blue study
where the texts are all
shelved on the mandible
of a diving town,
where poetry leaks from
the wounds and
fire rages where we drown.

**

Again:

WHALE OF A KISS

O Niamh, thy kisses were as sweet
as the blue joyous wine
of the wave of the sea-wind
- song of Oisin(Fiona Macleod)

Sweet sea-woman who
departed in a crashing wave,
who would have thought
your absence would sing the
whale who rides beneath
this hand, tolling love to
the trenches and ends
of all seas? Who would believe
that wounds inflicted
by the wildest kiss of all
would come to worship
far at sea not the person, nor the season,
but the brute cathedral
whose jaws frame and deepen
that door you walked out through?
Certainly not I, nor would I
wish this fate upon anyone
who would set pen to page.
St. Brendan Eastered on
the back of a whale for
seven years, that beast the
font and sacristy of all
departures seeking bliss;
Ishmael unshored from
dismal human ends
when he stepped down
into the boat in chase
of the same beast
which his captain would
at long last ride.
I'm just another scribe
upon the same scriptorium
who breeches and sounds
the salt acreage of doom.
All because of that one kiss
which woke the words
for holiness from their
Christian, modern grave.
No matter where I row
I keep shoring on the
back of this ancient whale,
my heart-rowing the
tide of his hot blood
deep in the oldest sea
of all, the one in which
I found and lost you in
three billion loves ago.
This dark swimming
has the sum power
of all waves' crash
into deranging foam,
its ground as firm as
any shore I've walked.
His basso cries
from far below
stretch the tenor
of my song far beyond
the sky and moon
which listens every
morning before the
break of first light.
The beast who carries
me rides between my
thighs, between all nights
and mornings that
I sought you in.
If you ever care to
look me up, just watch
for that flash spume
out beyond the margins
of the tide where
every surf begins,
a lonely antiphon
for a long lost kiss.

***

And again:

GLUTEALS AND FLUKES

If you would write a fable for
little fishes, you would make
them speak like great whales.
-- Goldsmith to Johnson

Why does every great love
invoke a whale up from below?
How could so gentle a song
reveal such awful glutes
and flukes? My heraldic
big-fish rider knows the
polyphonic ways of love,
riding that blue wave
upon a sea-swallower's back,
holding fast to the gallop
which has sounded
every acre of abyss.
Feel the chaos in those
feral haunches which
both ride and power
today's wave toward
your next shore.
A brutaller lover of brine
and depth surges in
this pale white hand:
My song to you is
pure spermacetti love,
that sea of oil which
tides inside the bulk
which rides all seas
and spumes all
songs and wells.
My paper trope
pours ambergris
from every shelf in hell.

***
And one last time, depositing me right here where I will begin:

BASS NOTE

A prophesy of Merlin goes,
Caer Fyrdin, cei oer fore
Daer a 'th hwnc, dw'r l'th le.

"Carmen then, a cold morn awaits thee:
Earth gapes, and water in thy place will be."

As the tide receded so
did its sea-sounding wash
of salted blood inside
my chest, leaving behind
this lonely room at 4 a.m.,
empty of all but this hand
upon the page yet
windowed by pure dark,
the world at its darkest
station of the night.
Yogis rise at this hour
to say their prayers,
believing the Presences
are closest now, the
worlds of ear and tongue
shored in Their
ghostly sighs which
course round the houses
and down the streets
in the low cold of
what's nearly a fog.
I can almost hear
that low bass note
which hums the
at the bottom of
the world, the sum
of deep sea waves
tiding basalt shores.
That incessant wash
is like a titan's mouth
from far below
singing the day's
first Om, a cold fire
rising like a sun
through substratum
blue to stir the
nascent day. Well, here
we are, the man alone with
his poem and that giant
not far from here, our
sound in league with
a faint cool breeze
in from the richest
canyons of pure dark.
First father, I have
quit the sea.
Pour me toward
the next poetry.