Five Dolphin Swimming Off The Bow Of My Forehead
Five dolphins swimming off the bow of my forehead,
glancing encounters with the moon that lacquers their skin.
I'm in a lifeboat under the full sail of a blank page
just to keep up with them, though I know I'm moving
into deeper night seas of awareness, too far out
to make it back to shore in time to make the curfews
of the lighthouses trying to keep the shore-huggers apart
from the salvagers who run down to the shores in a storm
taking over from the mermaids like a nightshift of scavengers,
who want to run you up on the rocks just as surely
by holding their lanterns out like the tinfoil constellations
of false hopes on the event horizons of precipitous cliff walls.
I revel in the glee, the ecstasy, the rapture
that doesn't mean anyone's coming to save me
of running free with my imagination for the pure joy
of living with it as the only known antidote
to the decrescent moon that had its fangs pulled.
I give my flightfeathers up to the wind off the sea at night
like a seagull to a sky burial that sheds them like apple bloom.
Mediocrity thinks that words are the sounds you make
like the names of things when you're beating
on a hollow log of a muse. Amplified echoes
of a weak pulse. Thunder without lightning. Life
without water and blood. Sex without lust.
But words are living creatures with an integrity
and mystic specificity of their own that don't need
anyone's voice to animate them, because
long before anyone was born to stick them like fingers
and things of the world into their mouths,
words were speaking for themselves
like nightbirds in the woods, the shriek of the hawk
as it whistles by like an arrow between the talons
of its parentheses, the hermit thrush and the mockingbird
that speak in the tongues of words they've cloned from sound.
How else do you think the fox in winter,
following the pheasants tracks learned to print,
and then later the leafless trees taught it cursive script?
Sweesh-ka-ka in Kwakiutl means robin.
You can almost hear it on a green bough
outside your window in the spring when the crows
from their island rookeries are squabbling for squatter's rights
with hopeful migrants from the south of winter.
You can hear it in the way a star splinters on a moonless night
like a chandelier in an ice storm. I don't write
as if I've been talking to foreign ministers all my life
with urgent messages from an abandoned embassy in Babylon
that shredded all its clay tablets like papers
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poem by Patrick White
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