Revisiting: The Merman's Head

The Merman's Head:
sculpture mix;
copper carbonite oxide;
matte white glaze.

This must have been the third of the four or five full-sized heads I have sculpted.

Window Tripping

One Beginning.

Running Aground Off Withaven Cove

Or, Time-Travel: 1988. Can you call it juvenilia, if you wrote it at age 21 or 22? Here's a poem I rediscovered while rummaging through old boxes in storage; I was supposed to be culling the past, and here I am, not or not yet. Listen: I'm not sure what I was trying to get at then, and there are phrases that make me cringe now, but I like how it all sounds, like the rhythms and the singing (yes, singing) still.

Besides having read my Melville, Stevenson, Coleridge, London, and such, I must have been reading John Gardner's The King's Indian at the time. (Also, "grim" sure shows up a lot; why? Was that my stab at "serious"?)

A slightly different version was published in Byzantium: Vol. III, by the Associated Students of UC Berkeley back in 1988. I'd written it a bit before that. I'm not claiming any merits beyond modeling exuberance by posting "Sea Doggerel" here.

SEA DOGGEREL

The hard deck heaves; the sea flames white.

The troubled crests shudder against the night

As the sky tumbles into the surge.

Melville stalks tavern planks, turning

A page--as the sea-swells do--and stark Ahab

Turns to in his mind. He drinks the mild Mermaid wine

And sets his words in stalwart verse, carefully

Weighed as an Emperor's gaze, falling far

Fathoms deep. (Through crusted hulls, clear songs breach,

The black and white leviathans of the deep.)

The untiring winds hurl us on. The old ropes snap

And flap and straight-a-way crack. The storm is strong.

"Land ho, ahoy!" a salt-washed sailor cries,

The clerk in tar-cloth, narrowing his eyes

At these winded shores of Withaven Cove.

The ship lists, to port, as his mind does rove

Where he hangs aloft ere Nowhere's icy rim,

Dangling fast from the mind's mainmast limb.

Aye, this shallow ship is shot, it leaks,

The broad beams split, and bald rats starving

Pace the hold, planking painted

With grim phosphorous--that stinking ship glow.

The salted clerk--no whaler, no mariner he--

Fears the great white birds that fail to flee.

Fall waters gnaw the windy shores. Siren

Songs call and the Christian seaman

Moans and rings the old church bell.

Ding-dong, dong-dirge, the cold

Swell's surge and the drowned man's bones

Shake and swell to fill the tones.

Words, grim words, are a seaman's lot,

The rotten grog that the Devil's wrought.

When the storm's aloft, it's grim advice

That whaler's bones be but hump-backed dice.

Postcard: The Anti-Gollum

Found a gold ring on the bottom of the pool today, oh boy. Once lost: now found. My salvage-diver alter ego--Nisus of Troy--lives. Gave that ring right to the lifeguard; not even tempted to court bad karma keeping such a trinket, such a trophy.

Second time so far in this life of mine.

First? Best friend's wedding ring lost in a lake. He didn't mean to lose the ring; it just happened.

One very stormy week later we returned to the scene of the crime, as his wife insisted, and I found the ring. We'd brought scuba gear up to this lake in Northern California, Klamath country--just in case--but simple free diving resulted in recovery. (Mucky bottom with a fine layer of moss-like webbing above two feet or so of mud; ring caught in that webbing: lucky.) My first real lesson in comparative geography: the lake was a mere 17 or 18 feet at the deepest, which fit the surrounding environment of rolling hills, glades, and gentle valleys. (We were a steep hike up from the Klamath River, but on that plateau the shifts in elevation were mild.)

Night-diving the shallow lake with that scuba gear and watching plump, pale-bellied frogs sleep beneath the lily pads: that was the real high of the trip. I still like how my buddy's wedding band appeared to me when the swirling cloud of disturbed muck finally settled, me holding my breath as long as I was able, not straining, but anxious for success, and the gold ring shining even at depth. (Gollum, gollum.) Those frogs, though, sleeping and dreaming. I have a fondness for frogs.

Finding the lost truck keys in the Klamath River was a harder task by far. Different trip. Not my keys, by the way, but my ride back to camp four or five uphill miles away. Of course, I had the goggles, and so I had the glory of searching and of finding. The Klamath is a fierce, cold river; fortunately, the keys had fallen out of a pocket in the eddying pool where we'd spent most of our time.

Nisus of Troy. Maybe I need a fourth tattoo.