his name is Ishmael
and he’s depressed in Battery Park
nothing certain but the waves
feeling and water taking up room
instinct as a solid, the energy between
a deck of cards
the endless incorporeal
unforgiving, like a November night
I was 21 and terrible
singing my tunes to the seaport
empty
in a way that floods
Pearl Street, the cobblestoned line
running through us both
girl and protagonist
writer and His characters
during close readings,
I’d hear the sound of my shoes
hitting the pavement
Ishmael tries faith
before he turns to bed
lays with a warm man
and yes this worship soothes him
two boats gentle and alone
rocking towards the edge
how one night at sea can save
sad stories like us
my man was savior too
rough to my soft and i was fixed
on him and his ways
portending like a reversed card
the first symbol revealed
to me a forlorn addict
at the helm like an apparition
a premonition
my lee shore
the place I am most bound
to land
then he’s on a boat,
our Ishmael lost in thought
a boy and his ideas
becomes a container for life —
a whale is no longer animal
but scripture; life dissected
rearranged into long, damp
inscrutable sentences
some punk kid
slumped in a crows nest
sorting it out for us
like God,
how vivid the story of my life
projected onto pages of ambergris
how tragic
the naïve ability
to find yourself in anyone
and like a zealot
I make this my holy book
Melville himself
walked the same line
dreamer, worshipper, vessel
Ishmael Ahab the Pequod:
bronze statues tall and rusting
in my oceans of thought
I found my faith in this novel
met my Lord as the fool
first found religion as obsession
an idea on drugs, an eternal retracing
like the line like that street
where we were first borne
Manhattan becomes the World
the cycle begins new
my heart, Ishmael’s daydream,
this story forever rising
sinking into eternal
unknowable waters
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