The Drunken Fisherman    



Wallowing in this bloody sty,

I cast for fish that pleased my eye

(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends

No pots of gold to weight its ends);

Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout

Rose to my bait.  They flopped about

My canvas creel until the moth

Corrupted its unstable cloth.



A calendar to tell the day;

A handkerchief to wave away

The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm

Pouching a bottle in one arm;

A whiskey bottle full of worms;

And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms

To mete the worm whose molten rage

Boils in the belly of old age?



Once fishing was a rabbit's foot--

O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,

Let suns stay in or suns step out:

Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout--

The fisher's fluent and obscene

Catches kept his conscience clean.

Children, the raging memory drools

Over the glory of past pools.



Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls

Its bloody waters into holes;

A grain of sand inside my shoe

Mimics the moon that might undo

Man and Creation too; remorse,

Stinking, has puddled up its source;

Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage.

This is the pot-hole of old age.



Is there no way to cast my hook

Out of this dynamited brook?

The Fisher's sons must cast about

When shallow waters peter out.

I will catch Christ with a greased worm,

And when the Prince of Darkness stalks

My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . .

On water the Man-Fisher walks.

The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket    




(For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)

Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.


I

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket--

The sea was still breaking violently and night

Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,

When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net.  Light

Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,

He grappled at the net

With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:

The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,

Its open, staring eyes

Were lustreless dead-lights

Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk

Heavy with sand.  We weight the body, close

Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,

Where the heel-headed dogfish barks it nose

On Ahab's void and forehead; and the name

Is blocked in yellow chalk.

Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea

Where dreadnaughts shall confess

Its heel-bent deity,

When you are powerless

To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced

By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste

In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute

To pluck life back.  The guns of the steeled fleet

Recoil and then repeat

The hoarse salute.



 

II


Whenever winds are moving and their breath

Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,

The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death

In these home waters.  Sailor, can you hear

The Pequod's sea wings, beating landward, fall

Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall

Off 'Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash

The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,

As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears

The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash

The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids

For blue-fish?  Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids

Seaward.  The winds' wings beat upon the stones,

Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush

At the sea's throat and wring it in the slush

Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones

Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast

Bobbing by Ahab's whaleboats in the East.



 

III


All you recovered from Poseidon died

With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine

Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god,

Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain,

Nantucket's westward haven.  To Cape Cod

Guns, cradled on the tide,

Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock

Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and sand

Lashing earth's scaffold, rock

Our warships in the hand

Of the great God, where time's contrition blues

Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost

In the mad scramble of their lives.  They died

When time was open-eyed,

Wooden and childish; only bones abide

There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed

Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news

Of IS, the whited monster.  What it cost

Them is their secret.  In the sperm-whale's slick

I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry:

"If God himself had not been on our side,

If God himself had not been on our side,

When the Atlantic rose against us, why,

Then it had swallowed us up quick."



 

IV


This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale

Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell

And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools

To send the Pequod packing off to hell:

This is the end of them, three-quarters fools,

Snatching at straws to sail

Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale,

Spouting out blood and water as it rolls,

Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals:

Clamavimus, O depths.  Let the sea-gulls wail



For water, for the deep where the high tide

Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.

Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,

Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,

The beach increasing, its enormous snout

Sucking the ocean's side.

This is the end of running on the waves;

We are poured out like water.  Who will dance

The mast-lashed master of Leviathans

Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?



 

V


When the whale's viscera go and the roll

Of its corruption overruns this world

Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood's Hole

And Martha's Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword

Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?

In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat

The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,

The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,

The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears

The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,

And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags

And rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,

Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,

Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers

Where the morning stars sing out together

And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers

The red flag hammered in the mast-head.  Hide,

Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.



 

VI



OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM


There once the penitents took off their shoes

And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;

And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file

Slowly along the munching English lane,

Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose

Track of your dragging pain.

The stream flows down under the druid tree,

Shiloah's whirlpools gurgle and make glad

The castle of God.  Sailor, you were glad

And whistled Sion by that stream.  But see:



Our Lady, too small for her canopy,

Sits near the altar.  There's no comeliness

at all or charm in that expressionless

Face with its heavy eyelids.  As before,

This face, for centuries a memory,

Non est species, neque decor,

Expressionless, expresses God: it goes

Past castled Sion.  She knows what God knows,

Not Calvary's Cross nor crib at Bethlehem

Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.



 

VII


The empty winds are creaking and the oak

splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,

The boughs are trembling and a gaff

Bobs on the untimely stroke

Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell

In the old mouth of the Atlantic.  It's well;

Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,

sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:

Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh

Mart once of supercilious, wing'd clippers,

Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil

You could cut the brackish winds with a knife

Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time

When the Lord God formed man from the sea's slime

And breathed into his face the breath of life,

And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

Waking in the Blue    



The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,

rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head

propped on The Meaning of Meaning.

He catwalks down our corridor.

Azure day

makes my agonized blue window bleaker.

Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.

Absence! My hearts grows tense

as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.

(This is the house for the "mentally ill.")



What use is my sense of humour?

I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,

once a Harvard all-American fullback,

(if such were possible!)

still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,

as he soaks, a ramrod

with a muscle of a seal

in his long tub,

vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.

A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,

worn all day, all night,

he thinks only of his figure,

of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale--

more cut off from words than a seal.

This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's;

the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie,"

Porcellian '29,

a replica of Louis XVI

without the wig--

redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,

as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit

and horses at chairs.



These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.



In between the limits of day,

hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts

and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle

of the Roman Catholic attendants.

(There are no Mayflower

screwballs in the Catholic Church.)



After a hearty New England breakfast,

I weigh two hundred pounds

this morning.  Cock of the walk,

I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey

before the metal shaving mirrors,

and see the shaky future grow familiar

in the pinched, indigenous faces

of these thoroughbred mental cases,

twice my age and half my weight.

We are all old-timers,

each of us holds a locked razor.