Ahab's tale never gets old. Changes by way of perspective.

 

Ahab's white whale, courtesy of the NYTimes.

The Avoirdupois Chic

More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile. – Melville

My depraved indifference to death
sets Ahab to thumping his peg
against my leg so we’ll perchance into
that which precedes an heir bearing
his bi-syllabic surname on banners bright
through the belly of the whale warm as
mutton and potatoes tea towel-topped.
If you can’t bear a son, at least a splinter
Mr. Ahab says, for use against blubbery
blowhard though how, you might puzzle.
No intimate to his intricacies am I
who harbor soft-spots for heavyweights
fat as concubines, the avoirdupois chic.
Given the length of a life in nautical miles
there’s hardly time for history to congeal
for the slain to raise kin underskin the
abandoned to banshee dreams as locust
swoop hover and hum desert-side
Ahab Uno’s tent on palmy summer eves.
Ecstasy is all it’s cracked up to be,
insufficient, a means to a cul-de-sac.
Are locust merely in love with love?
Starting soon, let’s no longer be afraid.
The locust are at the door, dear. 
Well, set a plate for the happy couples! 
Tomorrow Ahab goes with his gut,
with its celiac flora.  Sing a seafaring
song of fish fingers, ladies, avast! ahoy!
Childhood fosters the eternal orphan.
God wants what God wants.
You, my dear Ahab, merely want,
though That Can Change, a sea battle
dispatch, a motto conceived of
circumstance and truth, life’s sequels,
now ebooks or available for download
at a workstation near me.  Near you.

by Sarah Sarai. first published in Berfrois in 2011.

Berfrois (https://www.berfrois.com) remains a remarkable amalgam of idea, narrative, poetry, perspective, philosophy, natural history, science, art, architecture, you-name-it-ism. 

God is whatever makes us better

Salvation

 It’s the weirdest thing, 

to be in love with a woman. 

Nothing else matters. 

Even that campy hate scorn is 

rick rack on a little black dress — 

you kidding me? 

Your woman is a body of miracle fiber, 

a tote accommodating 

a change of clothes and good shampoo, 

a heated embrace, an epicenter 

a little sun next to you 

preparing you for your dangerous salvation.

 You have to find a way 

and a sherpa anxious to 

shake out, lean over, 

anchor raw minerals 

on the four directions, 

the four elements, 

the nonrefundable missteps.

 God is whatever makes us better. 

Who’s seen Her, besides 

          William Blake 

          and ten million mothers. 

Do they agree how shining her hair is 

or that her voice is the unified theory 

of everything arranged for strings?

 The idea is to be led to something 

          that is not you. 

If it is the solar system in your arms, 

          pinging you, well, that works. 

_______

®2015. Sarah Sarai, Ping-Pong, Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Library, 2014. 

Wallace Stevens; Susan "My Emily Dickinson" Howe, Wallace Stevens

On that space for religion?  The enlightened write:  Wallace Stevens.

Poet Susan "My Emily Dickinson" Howe and Wallace Stevens scholar Joan Richardson so worship, and tonight hit the pulpit at the Philactetes Center on East 82nd. They said this and that. Read some Stevens. Preached the word.

Being a group of western civ-central white people (sigh) there was alot of talk about categories. We white people like our categories. Is it a [Stevens'd work]  poem? Can it be music? Rembrandt?  Plato, of course, was mentioned. We white people like the Greeks.

Your intrepid reporter cum slightly sarcastic Stevens lover suggested that's why many poets create collages--music on words next to doilies next to a road map superimposed on Plato.

Catallus was the Platonic dialog referenced (though I jotted Cratallus).  I didn't care about careful notes so I can't tell you which poem submits itself to Socratic questioning.

Susan "My Emily Dickinson" Howe talked about the opacity of "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" and how one of the lines (I can't read my notes!) (I'm so tired!) has lo and behold a word she looked up in the OED. Its fourteenth meaning was a bingo and she wondered if she was "the one reader" (equalling all readers) Stevens has written about. If he chose that word for her.  He did!

Am I making sense?

Final jotted note:  Peter Quince took a bite out of himself and winced.  That's me.  Rest assured that not even exhausted Sarah Sarai can ruin Stevens.  Why?  SHE LOVES STEVENS. She also loves the feeling of rearrangement signaling new work soon to appear. Howe and Richardson are lovely, by the way.

Night night.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

________________
by Wallace Stevens, a great American poet

Poem: "Today no one is your friend." Spinoza in housing court, Descartes, an infant

As I was scheduling a housing court appointment in December 2008, a messenger (a legal messenger, akin to a jazz messenger) in a sharp blue suit, smart, really smart, black, offered to represent me. His pro-bono client hadn't showed and he was training a new lawyer.

All of a sudden I had a team of lawyers, both gorgeous, the trainee from Africa. When we walked down the hall a few weeks later I felt like Madonna flanked by her people. Just when things were dicey, Sarah Sarai had herself an entourage of snappily dressed professionals.

A mother walked up and down with her baby while I waited in the wide corridor—111 Centre Street is a boxy and merely functional building. I pulled out my notebook.

My lawyer leaned over to ask me about my plans. Plans? I conjectured on the probable niceness of the opposition; he tried to toughen me up. The title? A direct quote.


“Today no one is your friend.”

Safe for the duration in a risen-cream snuggly
against his mother’s heat down and down
one peeling corridor. An inquiry

from my lawyer: “What’s your plan?”
Start here and end when informed in Blake’s
“autumn of the seraphs” or

by a distraction of friends buzzing
near a white light bright enough for interrogation,
though the only query from

family ashy in the scattered Pacific is
“Nice to see you, did you think you’d end up here?”
Some asking of

a convert from Descartes’ distinction of finite and
infinite (I know that I am finite; therefore the infinite
exists)

(there’s me and there’s You); to the infinite miracle
of Spinoza, who saw perfection as rational and
merely thought

to surpass human comprehension. He polished lenses
every day, an endless impermanence, and was fully lit
with joy.

________
Sarah Sarai, published in Flâneur Foundry, Issue II, Spring/Summer 2010 (http://www.flaneurfoundry.com/).

Poem: "Further Arguments" -- Nonbelievers, sisters

I dedicated "Further Arguments" to one of my sisters, a nonbeliever to her core.

She was a good mother to my niece and nephew and though she considered retiring in the Southwest, didn't because, "I don't want to miss out on E- and E- [her grandchildren]. They're too much fun." Friends, financial security--or as much as anyone not wealthy has--she led a good life.

Given our fanatical Christian Science childhood--Mom was a convert, and you know the fervor of converts--with tones, jokes and intellectualizations of our secular Jewish father--any spiritual closeness or abhorance makes sense although the other three daughters found "spiritual paths."

I'm a mystic (bold of me to say, but there it is) (more to it, but I'll leave it there for now). My only complaint in this regard with my sister was her antagonism toward belief. You could not say a word to her about anything remotely related to spirituality, let alone cast your eye upward before digging into a good meal without a sharp remand.

But sharp and quick criticisms generally mean a deep nerve has been struck; a childhood memory is unhealed. The four daughters had plenty of them.

My sister died far too young, of cancer. She went through four years of chemotherapy. To the end she held hard to her nonbelief; foolish or brave; definitely honest. After she passed I went to Gilda's Place for grief support. On hearing the above, a counselor said, "Well, now she knows for sure." Here's the poem (not written with her in mind but dedicated to her).

Further Arguments

If there is a god you must sculpt my bellied likeness then
bury me so dirt chokes my cry.
If there is a god you must bruise me with your broad hand,
the one with the Rolex.
If there is a god, you must snap my bones and giggle.
If there is a god, you must punch my womb and admire
my body’s pliancy.
If there is a god you must plunge me to a watery death,
as an argument rivaling Aquinas’ that there is a god.
If there is a god you must burn me, millions of me,
and warm to the frisky stench.
If there is a god, pray gratitude you were not born me,
and who will blame you?
You are reading this, you are not reading this. There is
a god.
You are listening, you are disinterested. There is a god.
You feel shame, or none. There is a god.
I am four hundred dead in the desert yet there is a god.
My children are target-rage and yet there is a god.
I am laughed at and condescended to and there is a god
there is, trust me.
I took the leap of faith over your life, proving there is
a god.
We are kneeling on our hearts agreeing this thing in each
of us is what I am calling god.



Published in The Minnesota Review [Spring 2007] and in The Future Is Happy [available at Amazon; SPD is restocking the collection].

Image from hopifriendseducation.org

Fiction: The Devil Is Her Friend

Yay! "The Devil Is Her Friend" is available for your reading pleasure.

Go to: stonesthrowmagazine.com. Click on "fiction." Go to end of list (saving the best for last or so I tel myself). There I'll be. Click. OR:

http://www.stonesthrowmagazine.com/pdf/sarai_the-devil-is-her-friend.pdf

I am very excited this story was accepted and out there, and here. Opening paragraph:

Pearl Miller can’t positive-think her way out of anything, not split ends, not adolescent obscurity, not her parents’ fights. Not even a flaming heat rash. Worse for the increasingly gloomy teenager is her observation that her mother Angelette’s religion, Christian Science, a New England concoction, makes her body seem like a detachable accessory to life, like there is the Real and Eternal, as Mary Baker Eddy wrote, and there is Pearl’s life. So Pearl takes a stand. “This isn’t making sense, I don’t want to go to Sunday School any more.”

What does Pearl do? Read on at the above url!