November 1856

In the midst of Moby-Dick,

Melville went to Hawthorne for a passage.
Asked him nothing, in the way
A friend asks everything.
Confessed to a shredding of the stuff
that bound his faith.
The parlor pleasantries,
The subsumed ache.

They walked among the dunes,
Apart and together.
Melville spilled laments like rhapsody.
Fingers curled as if around a pencil,
Sand spread out like stars between his feet.

That day his kin denied the hand he offered,
So he unmoored himself: the castaway,
Anchored to a desk at Ellis Island,
Tossed by time like Pip by waves at sea.
There really is such thing as too much knowledge.
Dread can warm the soul like ecstasy.

A Brand

Find a working flame and heat the metal.
Brand yourself when it is sufficiently hot.
Carve some living flesh into a knot.

Once the searing is done, the pain will settle.
That silhouette of flesh will never rot.
Your brand will live forever in that spot.

---

Using user-friendly words and cartoon pictures,
And in the name of progress, brand yourself.
Online traction is good for your avatar's health.

Now you can download all of the scriptures.
Progress never ceases - walk towards the light.
Eternities spool in the bellies of satellites.

Under the Ridge

Our Lady of the lake, the valley,
Lady of rotting trees.
Pine needles in cobwebs
Are weathervanes, spinning me.  

Our Lady of father-son camping,
Make tomorrow as good as I know it will be.
We will name the unnamed lake.
Hide this ridge for history.

Our Lady of heather hillsides,
Lady of ridges of aching green,
Fill the old campsites with grass,  
Grow moss among the scree.

Our Lady of the snowmelt,
You freeze, you drip, you feed.
A trickle, a stream, a river –
We cross it, and are free.  

Apoem

A flaccid supposition -
no instructions were given.
There is no bough that cannot hold
the whole of nuclear fission.

A hunch, she had, a vision
of the suit man's truculent mission.
That supple bough is bending
into oblivion.