At the Spouter

In the dark entry, nailed
And framed in weathered wood,
The blunt blue whale impaled
Himself on three masts. Could
There be a better cross?
Better catch? Better caught?
Ishmael, seeking doss
And beef and biscuit, sought
Out The Spouter. The host
Offered a coffin bed,
A shroud filled with the ghost
Of family. He said
Little, listened alone
To sailors, rum and gin.
Later his candle shone
On tattooed skull and skin,
Rude wood god, sacrifice.
His thoughts and slow fears grew
Together in a splice
Of dream and dread. He knew
He and the harpooner
Would share a Christian bed.
This Ishmael, sooner
Than he wishes, will tread
Dangerous decks, reef sails,
Let davit tackle fall,
Pull in pursuit of whales.
Those are tomorrows. All
He need know now: a friend,
Savage and scarred, to keep
Him company, the end
Of thought, darkness, and sleep.

The Harpooners

Dark as the deeps, tall as trees,
Africa's son, he wears these
Gold hoops in his ears, will seize
Oar and pull, barb and dart, ask
Only these two things of Flask.

This savage, who will serve Stubb, will serve too
All the wind and water, all the gray waves
Swirling on the world's raw rim. Now he saves
Himself for deathblows. Now he longs to do
The thing he's paid for. Take the harpoon, coil
Easy line, balance the stick, prick the whale,
Goad him to deepnesses until his tail
Opens flukes, founders and he spouts red oil.

Quiet and quick he rammed his dart
Under the whale's humped head to blur
Eye and starlight, let heavy heart
Explain itself to death. How sure
Quick and quiet he'd left his own
Unquiet heart behind. No blade
Ease him open. Ocean alone,
Gaping and grave, knows how he's made.

Johnny-on-the-Shore

Oh you whalers and your whaleships that stand
Out from the harbor where the widows grieve,
You who return so many years from now
Filled with the ocean's oil. How could you men
Who ship out see what it means to those who
Stay ashore? How could the sea's slow sidle
Seize these men who heard the slap and sliding
Of the waves and not seize sixty times more?
I pluck rocks from my fields, labor on land
That grudges every seed I send through sieve.
I mend the pens. I milk the spotted cow,
Shear the sheep and wash their worsted wool. Then
I reap and thresh and bale, a landsman. You,
You will pluck behemoth from his idle
Pasture, from the fair field where he is hiding
Oh sailor, have you worn the oilskins I wore,
Wear now in my daily rounds? Can you see
How I would be whaling alongside thee?

A Dream at Sea

Sliding to the surface, ramping, rising
Like a slab of pale smooth ripe cheese, a moon
That waxes on the water and soon, soon,
Bursting all wide waves open, despising
Depths, the whale breaches. On his wrinkled brow,
Scrapes and scars. The sea cleaves his limpid eye
As if he wept. He cleaves the sea and sky
To bring his broad body beneath our bow.
Oh he is pale! But his wide wry mouth smiles
As he shares his joke with wind and weather,
Flirts flukes and floats. We are there together,
Whaleship and whale, seeker and sought. The miles,
The leagues behind, fathoms below, measure
Our desire, measure his distance. He slides
Sideways, spouts, and as we launch our boats, hides
His whiteness in green water, his treasure,
All his oil, bone, blubber, blood and beauty,
All his body down to the dismal deeps
That swallow him. He swallows seas and keeps
A salt covenant. We do our duty,
Keep our covenant with this whale who seems
To sound and surface in our deepest dreams.

Ahab

Nail the gold escudo to the mainmast.
Drive the nail as you drive the men, nor
Spare thyself nor anyone, now nor past,
That speaks or could speak or has spoken for
The white whale. You stand on whittled whalebone.
Certain, you seek that which has made you half
A man, certain you must be whole. Alone,
You know you should be lonely. So you laugh
Without smiling, strike when you must, reason
When you will. But nothing brings what you seek
Close. Where is the whaling ground, the season
That will solve your searching? Now you may speak
To your men, preach and pray, but none but you
Could know how to search for what you will find
Impossible to find. You are one who
Cannot remember what he lost, nor mind
This further loss. It is your disaster,
This search. The tragedy is that you chose
To play the same role the same way. Master
Of nothing, speechless at your story's close,
You shall, on the whale's hard hammerhead, be
Driven down to the bottom of the sea.

Pegleg

How hard it was to hear the rap of bone
On wood when he walked solitaire at night.
We slept in hammocks slung belowdecks right
Beneath his tread. The oil lamp swung and shone
On the swaying canvas where I, alone,
Listened for his lonely step, the tap bright
As a lit lamp and concentrated, tight
As sailyard when the wind has come and blown
My labors down. If sleep had slipped and grown
Elusive, I could hear the ivory bite
Into wood, into flesh, hear how it might
Wear out the man, the deck, that it was thrown
Upon. There in the darkness I would hone
My thoughts upon this pegleg bone and sight
Along its length. I could discover slight
Roughnesses here, a slickness there, my own
Sleepless mind, whose minding must insist
On fashioning what's missing from what's missed.

Trying Times

On the afterdecks trying pots boil.
Gobbets of blunt blubber, bobbing blobs
Of green fat blur and break down to oil.
Here are the flensers doing their jobs.
Spraddle-legged on the shake and shiver
Of enormity lashed to shipside,
Sending their sickles in to sliver
Six-foot sections peeled from the whale hide,
Seized with tong, grapple, hoisted aboard
To braise in brass kettles. The fat flame
Below the pot fed with whale oil, stored
Heat rendered from what the beast became.
The flensers probing with steel-tipped poles
Seek out cavities within the head,
Seek out the waxy gray stinking rolls
Of ambergris, whale vomitus, dead
Matter for live scents. And if sharks, drawn
By bleeding, gather to slash and rip,
The body is beheaded, brain, brawn,
Sundered. The vertebrae snapped. The ship,
Lightened, lurches up. The great gray dome
Sinks slowly, circled by sharks, sharp teeth
That close and bite and sheer off and home
In again to gouge and gorge, a seethe
Of salt sea, blood and bubbles, brine, brains.
The whale is gone. The whaleship remains,
Leashed and listing to a headless hulk,
Flaying its flesh, belittling its bulk.

Ishmael in the Water

I am what I am. So the white whale tells
The sea. The sea, with its multitude of tongues,
Says nothing. With infinities of lungs,
Catches its breath, lies on its bed of shells,
Of shales, of sands. The white whale slides inside
These silences. His maw gapes to swallow
All the dredgings of his wallow
In the clear green grazings. Can he not hide
His heart in these immensities of ocean?
Can he not save himself from steel? He must
Depend on error, must depend on trust.
He must sometime lie without emotion.
He must realize that he is alone.
And I, can I decide, after a look
At this whale, can I decide that a book
Can tell me about anything unknown?
I am what I am. Where does it say I
Must be alone and the whalefish must die.

Melville

Here he comes now, slow, down along the docks
He visits daily. See his old slouch hat,
His greasy overcoat. He gives a pat
To pockets, fishes out a key, unlocks
His dusty office. What he does inside
Is just what every customsman would do
In New York City, 1882.
And nothing shows he's nothing left to hide.
He's known as Mr. Melville and his books
Don't sell or, rather, don't sell well enough
For anyone to live on. He's seen rough
Times, times far worse than these times. Now he looks
For a living from his harbor post
And seldom inks his wooden steel-nib pen
For anything but bills of lading. When
He writes, records realities. Most
Of the time he finds he doesn't miss
The life before the mast, the South Sea isles,
The voyages that lasted months, the miles
Of water holding whole horizons. This
Is over. He does not often think
Of days indoors before his desk, first sight
Of scripture stark on printed page, to write
Until his fingers stung and sweated ink.
Those days are over. Ishmael no more,
He scrawls initials, blots with soiled sand,
Seals with a rubber stamp. Then key in hand,
He shuffles to the street and locks the door . . .
As he has learned to lock out Ahab, pale
Sad sailor and his captive god, the whale.