DREAM SEQUENCE WITH WHALESONG

A Poem

In 2005, I wrote a poem inspired by a recurring dream in which I found myself afloat in a nighttime sea. The stars were scattered like diamond dust across the sky and reflected in the calm, dark water, and I could not really tell if I floated in the embrace of the ocean or the heavens. I was not afraid—only steeped in wonder. All was silent and still until a sudden mournful song arose and I was surrounded by whales. They swam in slow, stately circles about me, never touching me yet imparting … something. Some message I have never deciphered. The dream returned several times, but I haven’t had it now for some years.

After reading the stellar Wail, written by the incomparable

EJ Trask

, I remembered this poem. Since I had whales on the brain, I dug it out to share.

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The boat: a small craft lightly rigged,

hull burnished to the sheen of a scrying glass,

a mirror upon a mirrored world, reflecting

speed and vigorous wash and spume,

yet refusing to foretell the next liquid hour.

A cipher for the night-struck mind,

she leapt and dived like a dolphin

from crest to trough and was thrillingly yar.

Her deck was bare and lithe; she bent to the wind

and fished along the waves, igniting phosphorescence.

No rock, no reef to wreck her,

but cross seas, greenlit water rising on its fluked tail.

Drowned canvas dragged up a glittered fathom

to kiss the moon and fall from the dizzy height

of surface.

The woman: adrift and fearless as a shark,

knowing the slide of sea on skin, its wanton slap and thrust.

Out of element, unkeeled and tumbling in the dark,

pale as a jelly in tenebrous wreckage,

she breathed as though gilled the cool density primordial.

The sea was the world, fractured blue and night,

tonic in scent, a mesmeric sway significant

as embryonic dip and drift.

The woman opened outward on the currents,

opened endlessly inward.

No drum but the heart, no ritual but the tide

as she melted and pooled and flowed

like a rush of sudden music, limbs of diffusing octaves

singing the dark interstices of buoyant stars.

The whales: navigators by constellation

crooning incantations that bind the world of deeps—

pink flare of conch, cobalt rifts and bubbled grottoes

undulant with kelp, sun from below like Spanish gold,

moon like the navel of God, the air a giddy balm,

land a distant melancholy long abandoned.

Hide to naked hide, hot in the cold velocity

of wild chop and foam, speeding ridges green-black

as night forests, they moaned their joy and rode

a planet of delirious motion, sucked deep the salty teat

and thrashed against the heaving belly of their heaven.

No fear of death, no cringing inhibition,

they swept around her, who floated open as an anemone,

as a quickened eye—they swept around her, ardent and fierce

with delight, rolling her in their jubilant wake.

They swept her away.