Melville, America

I

He had spent his youth at sea, had read

the ocean's books, leafed through islands' leaves, waded

through the whale's brain, felt the heat of love's cheek.

The sails breathed in his chest like albatross wings

while he lived shut up in a house amid stifling trees

with a woman as tough as a beached boat

in a landlocked love without waves or depths.

His thoughts darkened before the red eye of the night lamp,

the morning's birds numbly touched their brass tongues.

The world's wailing he bore within himself, a bellowing

from oceans and sunken peaks. The horizon

revealed not a single sail. And in vain he sought

the traces of a man's feet, broad as the leaves of waterlilies.

Why did dust form on the lagoons of temptation?

Why did he see fires far off between tree trunks,

and the whale's giant fin against the sky when it dived

to suck giant squid from the caverns of the deep,

and a mad man with breakers around his forehead

aboard a death-ship rattling with dry laurel?

O love deep-sunken like a white tombstone

or like a sail unfurling its unwritten poem!

II

Boots marked by the teeth of wild beasts,

teeth that had killed a stag beside the ruin,

river disappearing forever into the mountain and

skin goose-pimpled under the tattooer's gaze:

a man with his umbilical cord in the sea, in quest of

the stone of reality,

threatened by the whale-oil-barrel pulpit, and weighed down by

a petrified maternal bosom.

Oh, shipwrecked, to live on beloved comrades' flesh salted by

sea water,

and then to be punished by rescue on a deserted island with

pepper-grass and sickening eggs,

thrown out into his endless memory of oceans, lured by

merciless distances and hurricanes,

where man was doomed to hang fluttering from mast or tentpole,

worn to a rag by the wind,

more and more enslaved by victories over nature!

Outside of time, cleft between dark and light, with the

salt-throb of the ocean in his blood,

he was the ocean rider, helpless on land like the albatross,

his wings uselessly trailing,

a harpooner on the lookout for original roots and original sin,

Leviathan of beginnings,

hunting whales breathing in the sea with lungs like blood-surging

forests,

relegated to dark and depth but forced always to return to light

and air.

His was a Greek love, nowhere domiciled, a dark-skinned wayfarer

with coils of wet greenery around his limbs,

his truth was impossibility, his dream madness, a crying voice

from the fellowship of the damned:

a dove seized by rage, oblivious of fear, and everything

magnified as at sunset,

an ocean rider who cursed fire, with the white scar carved

by lightning's thrust along his body,

rebelling against the elements, against the fatherhood of nature,

the god of snow, being all powerful on its throne of skeletons,

in a battle against the mountain of white myth, against the

slavery which left his hunger unsatiated, cannibalistic,

an outcast among his sons, in fear of drowning, his sex eaten

by fish.

Circling the world's navel, racing over the ocean, his life

existed before birth, not beyond death,

but he gave in to the pressure, the traitor within him, the grafted

dread, the soured mother's milk,

he betrayed his damnation, lost his truth, his ocean, his

darkness and his struggle,

became the man who had gone ashore, brotherless, among sisters

disguised, forbidden, witches averting their sex,

choked in this life, whitewashed with lime and snow,

victim for a sacrificial offering, for a murdered brother

made divine by treason,

and he lost his manly voice, a eunuch of silence,

but wheels continued to crush horizons and thighbones and

distances were annihilated by fire that exploded in captivity.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul/Aug 1996
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved