Doom to the White Whale!
Sail on. Who was it said that? Sail, sail on, again,
Until the earth is asterisk to proclamations
Made by God long years before a Bible scroll
Or ocean wave unrolled,
Before the merest sun on primal hearth was burned
And set to warm the Hands Invisible.
I stay, I linger on, remain;
Upon my rumpled brow my destiny is riven deep
In hieroglyphs by hammerings of God
Who, ambled on my head, did leave his mark.
I am the Ark of Life!
Old Noah knew me well.
Do not look round for ruins of an ancient craft,
I kept his seed, his love, his wild desires by night,
His need.
He marched his lost twinned tribes of beasts
Two and two and two within my mouth;
Once shut, there in the Mediterranean north,
I took me south,
And waited out the forty days for dove to touch my skin
And tell by touching: Earth has perished. Earth is washed
As clean as some young virgin’s thighs from old night and sin.
Noah looked out my eye and saw the bird aflutter there
With green of leaf from isle somewhere at sea.
I swam me there and let them forth
Two by two, two by two, two by two,
O how they marched endlessly.
I am the Ark of Life. You be the same.
Build you a fiery whale all white,
Give it my name.
Ship with Leviathan for forty years
Until an isle in Space looms up to match your dreams,
And land you there triumphant with your flesh
Which works in yeasts, makes wild ferment,
Survives and feeds
On metal schemes;
Step forth and husband soil as yet untilled,
Blood it with your wives, sow it with seeds,
Crop-harvest it with sons and maiden daughters,
And all that was begat once long ago in Earth’s strange waters
Do recall.
The White Whale was the ancient Ark,
You be the New.
Forty days, forty years, forty hundred years,
Give it no mind;
You see. The Universe is blind.
You touch. The Abyss does not feel.
You hear. The Void is deaf.
Your wife is pomegranate. The stars are lifeless and bereft.