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.

When Herman Melville & Emily Dickinson Made Whoopee (on a prairie on the high seas)

First of all, due to circumstances beyond my control, such as fulltime work and wifi-connection issues at home, I have had to stuff the 3000 Loving feature "Foodstuff Friday" in the freezer. My freezer, known as "back burner" to some, is commodius and durable, so no worry there. 

Secondly, if Emily and Herman were to trample gender-inclination expectations (she being thought to veer toward the ladies and he toward the men, though the Kinsey scale is merely a scale and many of us are all over it), they well could have produced me.  (And I would be, and am, a production.) 
I just read Elizabeth Hardwick's beautifully written short biography of Melville, entitled, I believe, Herman Melville. His inclination to ponder the immortal was reinforced (should Moby-Dick and friends not settle the issue) by the following quotation she offered from Hawthorne's diairy.  Please note that I found the quotation online at the blog Hawthorne in Salem.

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists-and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before-in wandering to-and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us (Eng NB, Vol II, 163).

Emily Dickinson ("Ma" to me) has reiterated her interest in Eternity and other malefactors not infrequently and so, when dashing off a bio statement for a book review of We Make Gardens by Jeanne Larsen, I wrote the following:

Sarah Sarai is the love child of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, who both thought frequently about death and its accoutrement and were each their own person. Her BlazeVOX-published collection, The Future Is Happy, was released in 2009. Loose Gravel Press will publish her chapbook later this year. Her poems are in (or soon will be in) reviews including Threepenny, Mississippi, Minnesota, Eleven Eleven, Pank, Boston, Gargoyle, POOL and Parthenon West. She has taught and does in fact hold an MFA (in fiction) from Sarah Lawrence College, (stories in ragazine.cc, South Dakota Review, Storyglossia, Stone’s Throw, Tampa Review, VerbSap, Weber Studies and more) but earns her living copyediting in ad agencies.

Well, you get the idea. I gotta copyedit (which is two words but I don't care). The picture is serendipity, pure serndipity.  I googled Mellville and Dickinson and not only found an image but it is attributed to Ron Silliman.  Providence is mine.