Poem written over the course of my first day off from the new job. I've had a fascination with Moby Dick for as long as I can remember. Today turned out to be an Ahab day, out here on the third coast.
Whalesong
Picture the purest whale, scarred,
enriched and battled, an entire betallian
scattered upon her hulk. Greet
her rendered in her own bone.
Preserved trophy, immortalized
ivory beyond literacy - ultimate
iteration of the devourer,
memorialized in her own tooth, agape
forever yawning, abyss incarnate.
She swallows every sailor she passes.
She lives elsewhere - gliding
through the collective trauma seamen's
lucid buoyhood. Right good eye
gleans the bountiful ruins of Atlantis
while left wrong eye wide alert for tentacles.
A man carved tentacles into her tooth.
They have not reached her, but they
are legion; she is distracted by
the dingy sliding down her gullet,
right eye on the captain. No hope for
seafaring men down below, none for her.
The sea is equal, lunar justice. She itemizes
Ragnarok, posing adjacent to a mermaid portrait.
She is without time now. Mascot of the local ale
house passed between drunken sailors, intoning
shanty stations of the cross, dismembering
cabin boys and masticating Machiavelli forever.
Even men in lighthouses fear her. Not a sailor
remembers her and loves the sea in her absence.
Nightly they come to the house of ails
to swim without fear of drowning.
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