Very like a Whale

I seem to wake and sleep ambiguously, to see and misconceive, to feel on the brink of something that doesn’t end, beauty that is more than beautiful, meaning that is more. The present is all around me, dreams, a panoply of crimes, smudges of erasure, memory made of clouds, camels, weasels and the unlikelihood of somewhere within and beyond this world. Here’s light, angular, ubiquitous with the milky pigments of belief. Here’s plodding time, breathing hard. Birds fly up, perch on branches, peck seed from the grass, (tug worms from the soil). I am not what I imagined, here I am the illusionist and dupe of my illusions, making the angels disappear, wishing them back again. Stories that shifted in the telling once were true: a virgin birth, a resurrection, a tiger who regained his human form, a crocodile who didn’t. I’m pitching words against the sea, it drags them out, flings them back again still freighted with my weight. The waves are red with blood, brown with shit, yellow with the sickly light, anything but blue and green. I am an insistent fizz and drone, deft, adroit, as elastic as necessity and chance, one more clay figurine with beseeching hollows where the eyes should be, as different from the others as I am the same, no more evolved than a roach, no better than a rat, happy as a labrador in the sun. This is grace, the rest is commentary and I would let it go: in millennia I’ll chatter metaphysics with a chimpanzee, now my thoughts are the antlers of the Irish elk, the wings of flightless birds, peptides spelling out the phrase very like a whale. Most organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive. Nothing can follow that. Something will. Blunt heads of rain, faithless wind, the stricken sun at dusk, knock-kneed girls somersaulting on the beach, the commonplace surprise of making love face to face, the heart breaking apart, an instrumental eye and instrumental mind rejoicing, a last cacophony of birds.