wjsullivan.net

Overloading the Machine

Epilogue

The restaurant turns
and you wish I looked nicer.

I just laid down and tried
to duck the smoke
because perfection was
a power outage on
a stormless afternoon
with clouds. Quiet.

How dare you read this
tonight.

I know the glass
is gathering all the dust
we must have missed
but you have no right.

I thought we should
have a candle while we talked
but you're not talking.
"I found out that softness
isn't something you carve,"
you say. "It's a grand design
you sink in the aquarium and watch
leak away," I say,

while watching
your fault lets me
down, a fragile blur of soft
mixups. The end of your nose
used to mean something, a sign
that language submits.

I can hear it, the first time
we rode the subway together,
sideways, but no one saw.

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams has moved amid the world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; has slept by many a sailer's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"

-- H. Melville, "Moby Dick"