On the bobbing skiff

Ahab lurched toward the inscrutable eye.  Was there no end to this sacrilege?  Forgetting himself, he leapt furiously onto Moby-Dick, thrusting his avenging harpoon to enforce justice and reestablish Dominion. Soon, he believed, his singular rage would restore the world.

Curiously, he found he did not fall.

Sticky lines tangle him tightly to his target. The beast, like the future, has other plans.  Entangled, entrained, the blood of Ahab and the whale, streaming barbershop ribbons, blending pink now in the boiling foam.  The whale turns to dive. In that graceful magisterial turning moment Ahab spies momentarily his loyal bobbing men.

In his tidy Nantucket nursery, Ahab’s young son looks up from his New England Primer, sees the Pequod enter the harbor, fully loaded with oil and love and merriment.  Rubs his eyes, then sees it not.

“W: Whales in the sea, God’s voice obey.”  The boy wonders how God feels about whales, exactly.

Ahab’s young wife adjusts her bonnet before answering the insistent door.  As the latch clicks, a wall of water pulls her under and swamps the house.  Standing up, sopping, astonished, it’s immediately apparent to her that selves will have to be carefully salvaged.  Along with the contents of shelves.  And secret strongboxes.

The young wife turns sleepily in a dream, synchronized with the distant whale, her sex briny, deep, wetter than estuaries, slicker than the fine spermaceti that lubricates even today the delicate focusing mechanisms of the Hubble. She is aligned with her husband and his onrushing fate on precisely the opposite coordinates of the globe.

Waking, Ahab’s young wife quietly ascends to the moonraked widows’ watch, embedding herself in the cycling firmament and a freshening wind.

And does not grieve.

Ahab’s bewildered eyes start popping as he comes undone. Time tumbles. The whale speeds to unfathomable depths as 5.5 million images, give or take, are blended sequentially, like animated Vermeers, Rembrandts, Copleys, Stuarts, drawings and daguerreotypes, morphing vividly on the flaring screens and variegated sensors of memory.

His grandfather’s tobacco.

The great whale breeches once more, and heads directly for the Pequod.  He and his beleaguered consorts have had enough.

And Ahab gazes down with new albatross eyes on what he’s done,

weeping seasons of desolate running squalls,

evaporating in the space of space.

Such are the wages of sin, matey.