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. 

Melville's Shark Poem: saw-pit of mouth . . . Gorgonian head

It's not that I am anti-big book by a long shot or haven't been moved and changed in the way other lives change us by long biographies, but short, incisive biographies are a canto of Paradise all their own.  Elizabeth Hardwick might wish to return to earth to write my biography. Her Herman Melville is so beautiful, especially considering obstacles inherent in so formidable a subject.

"The bibliographic material on Melville is intensive, extensive farming, ever piling up like threshed what to go off to the silo," Hardwick writes. Just read the book, okay? The Penguin Lives series excels in production of short interpretations of lives. Longer than Plutarch's Lives (individually) but not by too much.

And speaking of Melville, here is one of his poems.  I trust Hardwick in her contention (and everyone else's) that his fiction outshines his poetry but the following is a good poem so go figure.

The Maldive Shark

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat—
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.

Herman Melville, poem courtesy of Poets.org; illustration from http://www.mundofractal.net/wp-content/gallery/gallery-13/sharks.jpg.