Written by Richard Mather
Shut up Here in This Caved Trunk of a Room,
On the Massachusetts Side of a Loose-Fish Land
We Call America — and Feeling All at Sea
In a World That Is Mad and Wet All Over
I Write down
This,
My Heathen Language.
Making waves. Much
INK OIL WAX SPERM BLOOD
Spilled to find the White Whale —
Whose mighty tail-flukes billow the sea’s shroud; whose peck-slaps flap and flood six hundred pages of Great American Prosody; whose massive genitalia remind us of Fallen Nature; whose sixty-ton body is smeared with blood of sailors and tears of fishermen; whose grisly altars are sunken ships, torn nets and snapped masts; who is King Molech, Ghastly Demiurge of the Sea; whose whiteness both masks and speaks of the immense and heartless void that lurks behind the flimsy images of the sensuous world.
Chase him — Over every sea on
All sides of land — Nantucket
Norway Chile Japan until this
Story is
Finished.
To flesh an iron
You must
First turn him
Fin up and
Bury it to the hitches.
I shall have him
— Scrimshawed,
Hand-spiked,
Blubber-hooked.
Written in pearly white wax
I pour from this pitcher of words to the
Brim of this poisoned well. I cannot
Staunch the oil that
Comes when words are
Squeezed too hard.
Candle burns low — Adjust the trim for
Deeper waters — Where away? — Shudder the skies.
Horizon a-slant — Sea a-heft — There he goes
(I mean blows) — Flinging his sea-foamed ivory
Weight in the sea-shower — Fins smacking water
As he crashes down — Such sea-quake power —
My sporting spouting mammal fish —
It is why the gulls
Jubilate and the small fowls
Scream.
From my vigorous pen
Comes a darting harpoon of words
— Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice —
Words that might lance the side of God
And dredge him up to earth.
But what we seek to catch
May see us
Captured in the same net.
Entangled in these lines I write, I am
Shot out from my seat into the
Creamy whirlpool, where my stricken prey
Waits for me. To the last we
Grapple — though we be shark-circled in the
Weltering sea — To the last we
Writhe.
Blooded, bashed and broken we are both
Sucked and sunk into the God-Knows-Not.
The good angels
Flee; the moon’s pale shine is
Dipped in blood.
The drama is done.
The sea’s throne is empty and
I have my ending. Continue Reading
Text © Richard Mather
*
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