Ahab's Creel

I account no living bone of mine
one jot more me, than this dead one
that’s lost.

-- Ahab, Moby Dick

I went after God’s white acre
in the full lust of my youth
and returned with less than half,
one leg mine, the other
in his creel at the bottom
of the sea. Not content
in outmanning me on
the yeasty wave,
he returned one night
to unman me right on land
when I was lurching
home in drunken stupor:
the ground beneath
me turned to water
and I fell, causing
the first peg leg to shatter
and shear me through
the groin. In the months
of red torment that followed
soul and wound fused
in one infernal ache
to barb that beast but good,
mounting that wilderness
like a groom to plunge
cruel steel again and again
into its milky flesh
til with a sigh that beast
remit my sheared leg
with a spume of black
heart blood. I am hotter
now in blasted age
than every hour of my youth,
turning on a spit of singleness
too dangerous for saner men.
My compass is witched
by polar holes of ache
and doom hot and colder than
the sea; there’s only one course
across the salt chaos of blue,
one fish to find amid the proffered
millions. Only Dick will do
and no lubber’s God is deep or wild
enough to properly name him,
much less refrain my blackened
quest for quell the high rage
of my lust inside his damned breast.
I’ll find that mountain phallus
of abysms and stab him dead
then mount him like a ship
whose captain has been creeled
-- well, that’s how low wounds go.
What was mown from me
I’ll sickle back: that body
that once fell onto me is my
collapsing repast, my diving
greed to font berserker
seed. I’ll catch him, by all Gods
cursed, or he’ll catch me
as sure as wounds are bone rudders
of the whitest most deadly ecstasy.