TAR
TAR
Expecting someone else, eh? You haven't tried your luck much if you still believe she'll walk into a place like this. I'm what you're getting and all you deserve. Blast, more than you deserve, but your luck is holding, such as it is. To have gotten as far as you have where your hairs got hoar frost and you're worn and smoked already and to be left with that meek, pleading face, I'll say you've got luck to have not over-tried pity a score of times and been left for dead as easier than the sight of you. Go ahead, shove off, it's in your mind to do it, but you don't have the mettle. Go ahead, you'll not offend me, I'm made of sterner stuff than that though age is rot. I look time’s fool, and would make the perfect clown if the falls wouldn't crack my bones.
But, just regard these hands will you? Have you seen ruins like these on your lawyers who you trust with your reason, or on your poets you trust with your soul? All barnacled up and too warped to bend, but tell me it doesn't awe you a bit to wonder what fine grain in time could have worn them this way? Hah, you got not the least idea the substance you live in. Even the dew's a deceptive softness won't smudge the rose but rasps against the iron over time like whetting on the stone.
I've held the watch three the dark morning not two days out from Maui, had the spooked helm in hand and the ship headed for the stars. Dark water, dark sky and not line between them, and the air ungristled silk could hardly tine a breeze, was starlight alone pulling at the bow gave us headway through the fine either lays up over the clouds, and I've learned it's as much then weathered these knuckles as bracing against the oar-lock in the Bering sea, though dawn poured in like lambs' milk hours before the first cut of sun. Flesh rots sooner than it can be forged, its a mix can never be tempered to hold the edge.
Go ahead, get out, I can't abide your look of pious attention, damn but it sits rancid on a man your age, and you've not earned a parlay with me. Go on, I'll talk to myself and conjure grittier company than you though they be shades and they'll knock heftier than your polite self has dared. I'll talk to myself and not be mad though my sweet reason is stormier than the madness you have toyed with as spice for your imaginings, and the casings will hold. I'm built of sturdier stuff and damn the cargo.
I was a dozen times over-built to carry more than my heart can stand, but my seams cannot be burst. I can't be staved; it is a torture living out what is consigned to a man. I can't off-load it. Madness did not ease nor befuddle me. I expect nothing from death. I have been bareheaded beneath the Northern Lights, and was not quieted.
I've been cast out and it suits my pride that I can't be fitted to live beneath a roof.
I have seen the heavens left with only the fevered colors the stars' rays make doused in the empty reaches. I've given it all up, fallen myself on the ice and the rest of the crew too drunk to notice me gone, and there I was, spent out I tell you, my life behind me and for no better reason than I was not sober enough to gain my feet. I floundered and then gave it up and was staring out on nothing and passed over as much as I ever will. Was an Eskimo who found me and carted me to the ship's stove to thaw out because I was gone and the damned clamor going on inside and no sight arriving of one thing to still me and soothe with regret or tamp down the life as now I found I must still continue. The fire set me off again like a peat block, and what I've seen of the other side it'll not cure a man of what drives him.
I'd like to know the man was quitted of it, not tired of it, there's enough of that, but quitted of it, having burnt all what fuel he had for the passage and satisfied to leave off. Hah. Spend your life as likely in the head as at church to have yourself evacuated of all stink, not much chance my last words will be a thanks-giving, out lived that already and outlived the fire without ash of work. God, but afterwards with the offal dripping from my gum suit, gore and blood caked, god but I was innocent then, couldn't say a word and a bit of the world no bigger than a flat head nail smudged up against my nose could hold me to the spot like the stitch through the nostrils of the canvas shroud, and that one last hook I could not get around blessed and holy, more than any icon, that place my scoured eye fell upon, my last peek at the world, and my nodding in front of it, a plank, a line, a gob of fat, no difference, but too gutted to shrug it off, this you take as your bride until death part you. No, I'll not have that work again as bang-headed me a fathom down into the solid ache and enjambed patience of matter. What suffering humors and moods I got, I've no means to expel or winch to set upon them would drag them out, but they gum me up in un-pumped bilge, rotten fermentation of my weak heart what's left to me.
Nor will the fuck come my way again. I've hated the bitches as much as any man what has his pride, the ones as is left to the likes of us was on the wheel of debt and whose time on shore just buried us deeper in the banker's pocket. I'll say I was a free man and crow about it yet but it was a sordid state that gnawed at my guts and had me as bug-riddled as wormy meat. Flophouse and gin mills was the most of what I knew and working for less than a day laborer if I figured my wages against what I owed for gear so I never saw the end of it. But I loosened the teeth of more than one poor devil affronted me because I kept the habit of walking upright as a mast and gave no elbow room to any man as had the misfortune to be as down in his luck as me, and that was provocation in me, that pride and smartness of body and a smile I kept which might be thought to be measuring the worth of all you'd done against the plain fact you'd ended in some flop at the Barberry Shore, your eyes bloodshot from the rot-gut what made your whining sound grand to you.
Pity then the sluts was forced lower than the low to scrounge among us lice eaten drunks for a few coins or a nip of whiskey, or worst of all, because they was women in spite of their hopeless fate, for a scrap of affection. God but to see the light come on in an old crone, they were crones before thirty, from one kind word tossed her way, enough to make you a gentleman in her eyes that you didn't spit on her. It could turn your stomach and make your heart into a rat ate through you, to see what fawning remained in the most salted pork. More than once I backhanded one for a soft look insulted me, I was not one for staying, or touched me with that pity as leaves you lamed. I wouldn't see that in myself and would certain fail them. And to think that one as herself had lost her teeth while mine were strong rooted in spite of scurvy had wobbled them out of my ship mates, could look upon me as a groom, oh it riled me, and took me to such drink as left me blind in the gutter when it happened.
Mercy on the hag as thought to bring the drink to me and careful not to spill a drop and set it there in front of me and meant to watch me drink it like the good wife would, sitting there and asking for none herself but just to have me take my pleasure in the cozy kitchen she was imagining, she was one to have her eye blackened. I was not one for the cover of a roof, I thought, I was born to bigger stuff and was a challenge to an empty sky. What soundness she had seen in me made her feel for nesting, my arms and shoulders and that dare on my face, was what the sea and wind had curried, and I would be out in it, you hear, out in it again as early as next tide, and damn all gin-mills and whores, and roofs as landlords worry on and slave to, finding each spike of light has augured through their shingles to be just a warning for a leak.
What I had of the sky left me proud, was one for masts and towers, this is what she saw, would sing again the spout or black skin of the whale from the crow's nest damning all heaven and daring all storms. I will flounder or swim out side, not scared of the bats in the belfry, but cry out the spotting, and hear the bells groan out the catastrophes under heaven, storm, flood, and fire, and peal for the birth of a man, that greatest catastrophe of all.
No, the fuck will not arrive again, that chance is lost and I'm left marooned. Flotsam on a sand spit, I can hear the gulls keening the empty wind. I took more than one of them, promised them nothing and was good as my word. Led me up the stairs which reeked of vomit and piss, and putting their small hand in my own, oh it was a touching sweetness and daft, the short walk hand in hand through the fog on the quays of San Francisco, no one to see so was not for fooling the blue-hairs, but to have for a few minutes a lover neither of us was to the other, I would have thought, because money passed between us, but lust is not the weakest humor in the flesh, and hardened though I would have said we were, those few minutes between bar and room was a sedition put a choke in my throat, and I felt my awkwardness in size and bone and sinew and left the passage to her, steering me by the hand.
And one there was who walked us side by side up the stairs and a squeeze it was, so our shoulders was crammed against the wall, and her hip against mine, a clumsy tussle but I made to consider her and tried to slip her room and it made my body innocent to have to account for her and spare her space and I felt her for the first time down the whole beam of me and felt her in kindness. She had me to carry her across the threshold, as she put it, and it should have been a bawdy thing, I'd have made a joke of it, yoking the man to be a beast of burden will you, and I grabbed her up like a sack of flour, I was of a mind to show what little difference she made in the world, and I shouldered the door open with a smart ram and it flung back against the wall, I had rude strength then and my hands hard as horn from the sheets, I was a bull in a China shop, skimpy though it was what few things she could afford, caught them all about in one glance, and who would have suspected what she had squirreled away out of the wind in her chamber, was a crucifix nailed on the wall above the bed, and a doily on a wood chest of drawers, how tight her talons must have clung to just these bits of delicacy she had grabbed from the storm, and on the doily was a comb and a brush of tortoise shell, and a hair comb of tortoise shell to hold a bun she might have likely worn to church, and there was beside this on the same dresser a tea pot and cups all of China no bigger than for a doll, all on a tray and set out in careful order, four cups and the pot. And she had leaned her head against my shoulder and had taken to looking up at me as if she was about to fall asleep or was already asleep like a child I had to be careful to place down on the bed, and I was careful too, against my nature, toed the door closed slow enough to hear the latch set, and sat down on the bed with her on my lap with her head nested on my shoulder. "Be careful, won't you", and I think that was too much, there's whores as have the idea of putting on a performance, there's even many as have earned a name for it and have customers look them up again for their style suits them, and I thought, she's pushing it, and damn I wasn't careful at all and didn't want even to face her and see all the lying in her face. So I took her from behind, held her fast by her flanks and my feet planted on the floor, rammed her with her arse in the air. I meant a prank on her by it but it spoiled on me. I bunched her hair up in one fist like I'd gather traces on a horse and bent her head back, and with my other hand pushed down on the small of her back bowing her whole spine so she had no play in her and was braced up so she ached. Mounted that way, I tallied the gewgaws a whore's conceit had furnished for the room and saw small pantaloons and shirt had been hung to dry on a rack in a corner. Rig for a child and no pretense for me or the others, some poor whore's son evicted for business who would share this room later and have his clothes washed out right here. Wondered if I'd been with this same whore before and could not remember, but there was many not much different and the wahinis on Hawaii and Eskimo squaws on Herschel Island and might be I'd left one or two pups and it queered me to think on it, how ignorant we all are pushed out into the world, thinking on seal pups as was abandoned on those rock islands in the ocean, the birds aloft and far sighted as Cassandra and screaming for it, for what they saw approaching, great castle ruins they look to be where a mad prince stood his exile and cursed the spume, the eyes of them where nothing yet has been etched, to be woken up into this old madness with the heavy eyes can not yet take a honed focus. It's the eyes of those misbegotten creatures held me fast, thrown up there on the shore and nothing to be seen in them but blackness as is between the stars not yet filmed by light, brim full of the long passage down that funnel.
Morning the sea was struck a blue color puts a varnish on the swell empties the water from below so it heaves like curtains moving over pure emptiness, and the rookeries was cast in rose from the rising sun and was no weight to things but the ship could have been on course to the moon in a lullaby, damn but I tell you I wondered the poor bastard might pop into the room while I was keel-hauling his mother through the fuck, and both would see his ghost in the other, God but it's some sad pitch and dear locked up in this fucking, his grizzled sea-faring sire back again to the very time the brat was wrenched back from the dead, and I eased up on her, scooped her belly up with my palm to ease the small of her back, even on a fat woman has a girlishness to it, my eyes on her pale back where I see the red scrimshaw her corset made beneath the small wing bones she has got stuck up sharp against the skin from her arms bracing her against the bed, the position I have her battened to, fine bird bones and the knotty arch of her spine bleaches the skin even whiter where the knobs press up tight. And how does it happen? There's a heaven on earth you must be twisted into like a gimlet, leaving nothing behind to sight above it, there is no paling to it or vapor, it's an ore seam in the marrow. What words are lodged there are in their substance dense in themselves more than once, surrounded themselves by themselves like nuggets, words as must be mined and have never been found wind-blown or hinted. Solid, I swear, as I've touched them and no lesser speculation can bring them up, but only work as you've not the like of today which hammers the soul until forgiven.
I put my hand on the back of her thigh and lifting it turned her about so we were facing each other and lifting her to make way, eased myself onto the bed. I had in my hands the golden ore, she had filled with it like a lantern fills from the wick, but it did not over-brim her. She had come all the way to the edge of herself and my hands were on her as she was, naked, solid soul she was, and myself too, stretched out to it and pressed flush upon it, so it was no longer to say this is inside us, no, this is what we were, and there was no room left for all the other was sharing the ride and had seemed to me the real cargo that my arms and legs had been consigned to carry, anger and savagery and a chip on my shoulder what made me dangerous to be stared at if the drink glazed your eyeballs and rested them willy-nilly on me, that was all gone and I could say nothing, not to curse her or my life as it had been robbed from me and bent into service for others, and only sounds came from me such as might be heard when butchering the whale, sounds as flesh and organs make when found and ripped, and all that came from me then when the strength was in my arms, when my arms was only strength and had her cinched clean around and my hand cupping her head and the bite upon me, seized up in the jaws of all this power what shook me and no words nor part left to rattle, when only the seizing was left, what came from me was mercy and pity and gratitude , and one word was left to me when I lay back spent and wrung, a word, must have been pressed like a nectar out of this bloody moil, and I said it then too, no, wasn't me that said it, but it was there on my lips like blood would be I'd taken a fist in the kisser, not like a word at all but a bruise on me had come from my own flesh it had been forced on. Angel. In the whorehouse, that word fell on me like a highwayman, and it was all that was left.
I'll not have the fuck again.
Nor the heaven charged work.
Fished the bowhead out clear to the Beaufort Sea, gave him no quarter in the end. Found use for them when there was no use, we would not give up the hunt. Began on frigates and brigantines and ended on factory barges, pulping them into dog food. We would not give up the hunt.
Years I slept in the fo’c’sle packed in with my mates. And some sleep it was to give it a name as sleep, always one or another weeping or moaning was only bone weariness would release you, just to be waken soon to the yells of another, or booted out myself from my own rest by ghosts strong enough to turn my bunk, or kicked awake by a sleep-walker dismounting the upper bunk, his eyes open but fast asleep, a ghost himself then, no one dared awake for the panic it brings the walker and for letting something aboard would pass through otherwise, or lying on my back with the work unspooling behind my lids enough to make my stomach turn and ready to throw up, that was sleep in the fo’c'sle, a fathom below the water-line, buried in we were, and through the hull hearing in our graves the whale's song , mournful and uncanny.
Then all hands up from that clammy fever to cut the whale down and boil down his fat to oil. A sight it was too, your gum- boots slipping on the gory decks, the blankets of blubber swung over the gunwales, the ship groaning and listing to the weight. Damn then what we rendered from that black flesh and white suet, boiling it down in the pots what it yielded by the hundred barrel was light. Would not have given up the hunt through we lived foul as cannibals, the masts black greased with soot and a stink of blubber ripening below decks. But it’s the only way I would have found it and to have known, damned as I was and miserable much of the time and moaning in my sleep and drunk my time between voyages. How else to have found what light there was sealed into the suffering, that all the groaning and gore could be the smoldering of light. You've got no imagination to know it today, how we come on them in the black seas, right up upon them, wood to black skin, and the whale lying asleep on the deep. You must see it that way to get an inkling, plied the lanes of the dead. We called them bulls and cows and for good reason for they were as calm in the pastures of heaven as any cow or bull on land, though I can swear as I have seen it that they swum through what drowns the stars and harbors the moon. We are unholy men and covered in blood, we are slaughterers, I choose sin and savagery to find some peace, but not a peace short of truth and tamed down.
We have winched them fluke first up the ramp of factory scows having floated them by their tongues to be collected later, their hearts blown apart by dynamite shot home from a cannon. This for dog meat when there was no longer light to be made from them but we weren't to be done with them, we still could not leave off. For that murder is never finished, it is never finished, we must be at it again forever. We recognized them like our own shanks, wrought by toil and made uncanny. Grotesque as they were was surer the kinship, because they were hugely disfigured, but was only the more flesh was risked and by anguish more warped. Was the song disfigured them that is riddled up in the flesh pound by pound and in them totaled too gigantic to hold a shape will not serve it, nothing left that may please just sight but all must be melted by the singing in the song, will spear a woman through the throat she looks like a gull has swallowed a hook, her throat to burst if the song will not let go if it can not get out, we knew that what is in the song had not quit them, only their size let them live at all with the song in gigantic chorus inside them, more and more. The bowhead, a church organ in the depths, traveling ahead in his chords. Their ten-foot cocks and thick as a man's chest, you could crawl bodily up the cunt. What are we left with if we snigger? A little itch? Not us, we believed in the loneliness of the bull, we believed in our hearts, in our bloody hearts, and in his, big as a box-car, and without words, its double-bass notes through the oceans. What is heard in flesh in him is magnified, in him it was grander and purer, nothing else could be heard. We knew their couplings, how they were nearly impossible and happened with no heat, the two huge bodies facing each other along their whole lengths, unable forever to clasp, they roll in tender grief feeling the beat of each other's heart.
I'm through. What I had to tell I've told you. We slaughtered thousands. I did the parricide a thousand times and it was not bled out of me. We followed them to the Arctic and routed them from the ghosts. At the last we hunted down the whale we named sperm, for the ambergris he carried, for the look and milky feel to it, and thought it out in natural course that from this we would render out perfume, the sense to it was clear as pre-ordained. From that stinking mass we would reduce out perfume, from what we took to be the sperm for his true generations that are bred into tragedy like the notes of a harp, this his true sperm from his organs of song, and for our generations all un-awakened, born deeply into the sacrifice, lost to life, as we slaughters knew it to be on the gory decks inside fathoms of blood, offal unbearably sweet.
