Beneath the surface…

Shifting weight, there’s something underneath…

The Dark Whale

Every day from this one I will fail to be able to say

how the whole world started coming out of me now

(violently and warmly out) (which is to say I hadn’t known before

how much of it was in me), how I learned to love 

like an open wound, making pressure 

in the ears through eruption, out like a plague of locusts, 

thrumming in unison, so I can’t hear the world

in its sinking, doubling, gurgling, scoffing, gasping, squeaking, shrinking—

When I try to imagine God I see this great 

Darkness (of the dearest kind:

Darkness the teacher and comforter 

the loving destroyer, render in two 

Darkness the mender, the toucher, the instructor and mortifier,

reminder of pain, rejoiner, reviser, blinder, vivifier, 

benevolent stirrer of the soul’s sediment, gathered at the cloudy bottom of comfort)

It is the dearest kind of Darkness (death

or the unending thought of death), so it goes without saying 

we are gaining holy ground in the upending of this table 

we forgot we were sitting around

this whole time—     suddenly to remember juniper, and scarcity, 

and robin song in March; to recall importance (and its reflection, and the shade 

it throws on what we have spent centuries building out of our billions of selves,

cells), of bodies en masse under threat, forming a pattern mimicking the tipped scale 

it has risen amidst; the aloft, the afloat, the cultured, the shortage

that turns at the core; the inversion of guilt, 

the backside of blame, which is blame too only rougher and more breakable;

the endless blank ceilings stared at in the dark afternoon, in the beating night—

(the unspeakable Dark Whale (that comprehending vessel 

of flesh that brushes against us (and we against it) in sleeping) 

(as bodies in suspension (almost borderless))

Those who gloat of gratitude will find out what fortune means (good 

or otherwise) when the horizon flips and the siding falls down, 

when the blocks disassemble in a tidal cyclone

of gloves, purses, papers, masks, crowns, scepters.