Audio: Read by the author.
Weeks diffuse into each other like
they’re sprayed; jetted, they shoot certain:
days, times, doodles, kept appointments,
next is lull, pool, fading, flash-disperse.
I was shook and shocked by death,
chanced upon it on a winter walk,
proof of plod for miles behind me
swept in fog, a wet so thick
it blended with the snow that
settled plenty on the sand. It
was not yet daybreak, and I’d driven
miles to walk and think,
find peace in sweat and sea racket,
that ancient wise asthmatic sound.
The light took its lazy time for lifting.
In the shift I saw a darker shaping
than the gray—at two miles a boat
of some proportion, at quarter mile a whale.
Since then I’ve been lamenting,
moving as if held in gel.
At night I dream it, see it stretched
across the wrack of high tide,
belly to the stars—flung shells and gravel—
throat-part grooved, fins unflappable,
balletic flukes symmetric
in their pointing, how they fused:
all this in half-light, all this in sea dirge,
wet air matte, toned silver,
and I hunched in the hood of my parka,
God-awed before shavasana,
stilled as if the glassy eye that looked to me
had fixed me in a century of tintype.
Ah-gah-pay. I’ve only recently discovered
love of animals—well, Kili, Nan, and Rebus,
three dogs. Now I’ve partly taken leave
of language, have given incoherence due.
I know what it’s like to be mammal
filled with deepest ocean sounds:
oblivion, solitude, stillness
intermitted by quake roar,
tectonic slipping, lava fissures,
ship propellers drilling,
the human croons of whales.
There is slave in me, fat heritage,
no fluke I’m invested with hurt,
echo of the hunted, located, natural
rights redacted, meagered to resource.
All is flux as I’m collapsing
love and distance, moving through the gel,
my life, edging the canals of my city,
clomping up its hills, memory aerosol,
head in self cloud, getting Melville
as I should have, watching at him
contemplate the vista from a landlocked house,
hills becoming pods of transmigrating giants:
Greylock. Berkshire range.
There’s thirst for music in this less than solid
state. Ampless back in my office,
I knee-prop my Fender, ancient black thing.
Strum it casual, weep;
suck salt in darkness, fingers guessy,
lazing up the sound. Still, something
brusque runs up me: shuddered
wood, that deep flesh shook
that makes string music fuse to you.
The thumbing further breaks the thing in me.
I know what now love is,
know tentative for sure its
incoherence, jelly analog, is mine for life.
The windows stay black and phlegmatic
as the air outside begins to heave with rain.
I hum, thumbing, fashion something of a home,
some succor, pulse quick but steady as I deep dive
to dub. With it comes the baleen
wheeze of mouth organs, plangent blue whoop.
I am dub and dub is water.
Exile, I wish you could have lived in me,
plunging, life spumante. I’d slip my hold
on you like magma shot for islands
every single time you breach.
