Of Dreams, Of Reality, Of Everything Else: Very like a Whale

by Brook Emery

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, ubiquituous

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

National Poetry Month #20