Whale: Johnny Pulp and the Lemonheads

In the beginning there is not light but someone listening. The sea is a syllable that does not end. A mouth opens in the dark and what it says is whale. The word rises in the formless waters and floats like a lung. I stand where the firmament should divide waters from waters and the division fails. Leviathan breathes. The breath is a planet. I accept that creation was merely the rippling of an eyelid. The garden is a cove, unmade and remade by tides that never consult the sun. A fig leaf lifts and is a fin. Adam leans toward the pool and meets a pupil that is older than the garden. Eve tastes not an apple but the oil that sweats from the head of the sea. Knowledge is a blubber fire that burns without flame. The serpent threads itself through a baleen comb. Innocence has teeth. We do not leave Eden. We are exhaled from it, like spray. A flood approaches before the rain. Animals enter a hollow rib that has already crossed the waters many times. The ark is a Jonah reverse, a belly that swallows the storm. The whale, immense and interior, lies still as a hill and lets the hill float. Noah counts days on the inside skin. Each day is a notch in cartilage. Each night is a hymn without subject. The world ends and begins in the same baleen, a curtain through which nothing passes but the smallest light. Job calls from the ash, asking for measure. The answer is a bulk that cannot be fathomed because it is the fathom. Where were you when the sea chewed the moon to milk. Behemoth is land that wants water. Leviathan is water that wants a throat. The hook is a question mark that cannot puncture a sentence this large. Job is given the mercy of proportion and it frightens him. Jonah is a vowel that falls into a cavern and becomes a choir. The walls breathe. He kneels on the tongue’s slick floor and prays to the god who is also the darkness. For three days he is a second womb and a library. On the shelves are voyages yet unwritten. Montaigne’s hesitation. Rabelais’s sailcloth laughter. Browne’s amber sentences describing a head filled with oil and galaxies. He reads by the phosphorescence of digestion. He promises to speak. The belly opens like a door and the prophet is a candle briefly visible on the beach. Kings make speeches to winds that refuse allegiance. Hamlet sees the cloud shaped as a whale and hears in it the father’s hoarse instruction. The Fairie Queen swims in armour. Davenant sets a stage where the ocean is the curtain that never rises. Hobbes names a lover after the ungovernable and believes himself safer for it. The Holy War is only a foam line. Paradise is not lost but submerged and therefore inaudible. Fuller divides the profane from the holy with the flat of a blade, yet both sides come away wet. Dryden counts disasters like beads. Edge and Herbert write islands that winter keeps. Schouten solves the circle by walking it. Greenland is a white thought that refuses to warm. Sibbald’s Fife is a spit of land gnawed by a precise mouth. Stafford writes a letter from Bermudas where every sentence is a palm frond and the margin a reef. The Primer recites, In Adam’s fall we sinned all, and a calf of whale vomit shines in the schoolroom like a moon brought to heel. Cowley’s globe is a looped rope. Ulloa’s South America slides under the keel like a reptile asleep. The Lock is raped by combs of ivory teeth. Goldsmith tallies the cost of light poured from a liver. Cook draws a map that is also a scar. Uno von Troil writes to banks of ice that answer with polite silence. Solander files the snow by species. Jefferson memorialises a whale to the French, as if an embassy could be sent to appetite. Burke measures the sublime and forgets it is already measuring him. Blackstone asks how law can hold a creature that will not sign its name. Falconer’s shipwreck is a psalm to splinters. Cowper listens to harpoons singing their straight notes. Hunter dissects a giant as if it were a cathedral finally consenting to be read. Each organ is a chapel. The spermaceti is a thought that refused to rot. Paley finds a watch in the dark and does not notice it beats like a heart torn from the sea. Cuvier arranges bones into futures. Colnett extends a fishery the way a shadow extends a body. The world before the flood lies just under the tide line, patient as a bruise. Lamb crowns the whale in triumph and the crown is made of hooks. Macy writes history by the light that smokes. Hawthorne tells twice because once never holds. Cooper pilots through the alphabet of waves, the letters breaking and rejoining like schools. Goethe listens as Eckermann empties his pockets of small oceans. Owen Chase keeps in his skull a sudden hole shaped like a white head. Elizabeth Oakes Smith walks the strand and cannot decide which is more tender, the calf or the knife. Scoresby names winds like children. Beale writes a lover that sweats. Bennett goes round the globe and discovers it is only another kind of inside. Browne etches the cruise onto a plate that will never dry. Lay and Hussey sound like a prayer. Tyerman and Bennet catalogue mercies that resemble exports. Webster stands up in a room while the sea moves the floor. Cheever’s sermons drip salt. Comstock counts casks as if counting were a penance. McCulloch defines value and accidently includes the moon. Currents are paragraphs that refuse to end. Tales of the Voyager stack nights like crates. A newspaper prints the taking and retaking of the Hobomock and the ink spreads like oil across the page. A cruise on a whale boat is a sentence without commas, the oars the only punctuation. Miriam Coffin sells futures to widows and the future buys her back. Ribs and trucks are a grammar of bone and leverage. Darwin walks the deck and the deck walks him. Naturalist is another word for pilgrim. Wharton kills a whale and the echo kills him. The Nantucket song thins the air to a whistle. The whale song thickens it again until breath becomes a liquid and the lungs are compelled to swim. I dream an index that eats its entries. Genesis is first and also last. The alphabet becomes circular the way a horizon is. In that ring the whale sleeps with an open eye. Commerce is a delicate machine lowered into the deep to ask for a favour. Theology is a net that catches only its own knots. Law is a ledger that keeps a single number, the weight that will not balance. Poetry is the spill that cannot be mopped, a sheen over all sight. Sometimes the whale rises under a chapel and lifts the nave a little and everyone believes they are raptured. Sometimes it rises under a courtroom and the scales tilt and the judge weeps because the decision was always underneath him. Sometimes it rises under a theatre and the tragedy becomes an anatomy lesson and the audience leaves oiled and speechless. Sometimes it rises under a schoolhouse and the children learn to write their names in steam. If God rested, it was on the surface of this animal, which is not an animal but a field of interiority made visible. To touch it is to touch the thought that precedes touch. We harpoon in order to pronounce, and what we land is a question that keeps bleeding. We boil to make lamps and the lamps reveal what boiling cannot simplify. In the end there is not light but listening again. The sea returns to its first syllable. The word is still whale. The mouth closes. The dream does not end. Job The ash heap buried before language. Job sits in the margin. The letters around him are insects, then stars, then small scales from the throat of a great creature that sleeps beneath the city. His friends arrive like footnotes that correct the wind. They carry reasons in jars and the reasons rattle like pebbles. Each jar is labelled with a law older than salt. They urge him to accept proportion. He answers with a torn garment of silence. Night comes up through the soil. It is not the end of day. It is the underside of day made visible. The moon lowers its face to the cistern and drinks until the water remembers its first shape. Job rubs his body with shards of pot and every shard is a mirror. He multiplies himself into a parliament of grief. A child of dust speaks for him and declares that the world is a kiln, and the human heart is the vessel that always cracks on firing. The others applaud as if a verdict had been read. Then the sea lifts its eyelid. Not far from the dump there is a plain of shallow brine where past visions come to be descaled. A fin writes a line through the moonlight. The line is a sentence that no alphabet admits. Job reads it anyway. He reads with his skin. A hidden ribcage heaves, big as a town with a bell in it. The bell is a lung. It tolls for nothing and therefore for all things. A whirlwind forms with the neatness of a law. It is a throat clearing itself. It gathers the ash, and the ash willingly becomes scripture. The voice within is neither thunder nor speech. It is measurement refusing to be small. Where were you when the first nail was driven into the floor of the sea. Where were you when the doors were fitted to morning and evening. Job answers with the only truth he has, which is his absence from all great beginnings. He says I was a smudge on the margin. The whirlwind laughs without moving. It shows him storehouses cut into the cold. Rooms full of snow that wait like conscripts. A clamp for the Pleiades, a key for Orion, a loose bridle for the wild ass. It shows him the ostrich mislaying her eggs in warm sand because forgetfulness is a sacrament. It shows him the horse trembling with war that has not yet been declared. It shows him the raven whose chicks cry to the sky and are fed from an arithmetic Job cannot learn. None of this relieves him, yet his breath begins to rhyme with the brain. The great beasts arrive in order, as if summoned by a catalogue. First Behemoth, a hill that grazes. Its bones are the rafters of long houses. Its belly is an archive of quiet. Rivers present themselves to its mouth and are not noticed. Job is invited to take a reed and measure the thigh, but the reed grows soft. He counts to ten and the number refuses to stop. Behemoth turns its eye, which is a shallow sea with its own tide. In that tide a boat rocks, rigged with human conjecture. The sail is scripture sewn from linen and good will. It hangs clean and useless. Then the water tightens. From beneath the mirror a furnace opens. The whale that is also dragon that is also lawless governance rises by increments like a long thought climbing a spine. Its back is a library of shields none of which can be opened. Sparks move in its throat with the serenity of a forge at prayer. It sneezes and the air becomes a chapel of pearls. It makes the deep boil like a pot and the pot is the world and we are all the scum that insists on being named. Job does not run. He surrenders to scale. Can you hook it. The question arrives dressed as iron. The hook descends. The line sings. The sea replies by becoming thicker than history. The hook beds in the laugh of an impossible lip. The line is drawn straight and the straightness is an accusation against all curved things. Men on the shore compose laws around this straightness. They declare that a creature thus taken is already justice. Leviathan continues to breathe. The breath is hotter than truth. The line smokes and the smoke writes psalms on the wind. Job enters the water to read them. His friends cry out that he is mad. He knows that sanity is the husk of a fruit already eaten. He swims until the ash washes from him and his skin is a new tablet. The whale rolls, revealing a country of scars. On that country he reads the minutes of every court that ever sat to weigh pain. The writing loops and overlaps. It cannot be copied. When he touches a line it ceases to mean and becomes merely warm. The voice, still in the whirlwind, asks him about architecture. Who taught the hawk the south. Who freshed the lion’s young with meat they did not earn. Who set the sea its cradle and then tied a ribbon to the waves so that children might laugh. Job answers with an apology for existing, which is all the architecture he has. The voice is pleased and annoyed. It has no furniture for pity. The whale regards him with the patience of a mountain. To be looked at by such a thing is to become geographical. Job feels himself divided into gulfs and shoals. He becomes a coast. He becomes a cliff thrown down from the laughter of God. He becomes a harbour without names. The whale breathes and the coast is fog. Inside the fog a theatre opens and stages his earlier life. He sees himself rich in camels and supposition. He sees the messenger galloping with burnt news. He sees the house falling on his children and the silence that followed, the clean white silence that dared to be beautiful. He steps back from the stage and the fog pours itself into the whale’s nostril. The theatre collapses into a wet smell. Job discovers his teeth. He finds, with scientific precision, that they are thin as a margin. By the skin of my teeth, he says, and the phrase becomes a bridge over nothing. He walks the bridge and arrives where the hook enters the mouth. There hangs a hallway of metal questions. He places his hand upon them and they ring like glass. He places his head against the iron and hears in it the old poems that thought the sea could be domesticated. The friends on the shore continue their ministry of jars. They have found new reasons and the reasons are brighter. One speaks of algebra. Another of brain. Another of the moral leverage of consequence. Their words reach the water and float for a moment like petals. Then the boil of the deep takes them and they become broth for the larger appetite. The friends, not seeing this, believe they have ministered well. They ask for God to endorse their minutes. The voice turns, and a softness enters the cyclone like a seed. It informs the friends that they have translated the wind into small coins and spent it on vanity. They are told to ask the man of sores to pray for them because he, who answered nothing, has understood the size of the question. Job, who has no coin left, pays with his breath. The breath spreads and calms the local brain. A heron steps into the margin and writes a narrow letter with its ankle. The whale sounds. The water closes as if nothing immense had ever used it for a door. The hook is left hanging from a sky that does not care for iron. Job climbs back to the heap that knew him. He sits and the shards around him shine without judgement. The friends hand him their last jars and he fills them with a silence that is finally not a wound. The silence matures. It oils everything that once caught. In the morning a caravan assembles from nowhere. Sisters he had forgotten arrive with bracelets. Brothers too, each carrying a small share of unaccountable blessing. The animals return, now numerous beyond arithmetic. The loverkeepers lay out their stones and try to count and the stones slide back into the sand to cool. Now that he owns again, Job understands that ownership is only a way of measuring the time between breaths. He accepts this without pride. At evening he walks to the brine plain where the moon rehearses its descent. The sea behaves as if innocent. He kneels and presses his ear to the wet. Beneath the skin he hears a machinery, slow and tender. It is not the churn of teeth, not the clack of armour, not even the bellows of an enormous heart. It is the sound of patience learning to speak. He says amen to it, which is a small word that means I have heard something larger speak for me. The whirlwind breaks apart respectfully. It becomes a brain we can live under. The snow stays in its room until called. The constellations loosen like hair at night. The ostrich forgets beautifully. The horse discovers battles of grass and indulges them. Behemoth sleeps on its own back. As for Leviathan, it keeps the deep sweet by stirring it with disdain. From time to time it rises under a city and lifts it a little, and everyone believes they have been judged when in truth they have only been reminded that the floor moves. Job sleeps. His dream is a ledger in which every debt is rewritten as a tide, and every tide is forgiven by the shore it scratches. When he wakes, the scar on the sand is a hymn. He reads it aloud to the morning and the syllables turn to birds. They rise toward a sky that remembers each feather because remembering is its nature. Somewhere far below, the great creature turns and offers its cold forehead to the tree of light, as if asking to be named again. The name arrives in the old accent that began the world. It is not hook or law or profit. It is simply breath.
Nineveh The city is a mouth that never closes. It pronounces Nineveh all day until the name fills with heat and shadows, and still it chews, solemn as loom. I am asked to carry a word into that mouth. The word is small and sharp and burns the hand. I wrap it in silence and try to leave by water. Tarshish is a rumour disguised as a destination. The ship at Joppa is a plank stretched over an idea. I pay for escape with coins that sweat. The sailors nod, are men who have seen many forms of fear and prefer the ordinary ones. We push off. The shoreline folds up a letter that will not be read. Night arrives in a closed eye. Beneath us, a chest opens. Storm comes out smiling with too many teeth. The sky lifts and drops its hem again and again, like a widow deciding how much leg shows grief. Her thigh is a sentence that keeps changing tense. The sailors pray to their household gods, tidy little hearths they carry in their throats. I pray to sleep, which is the only god that knows me. It refuses me to my face. Fuck off then. The lots are thrown and all the pebbles point to my name as if they were iron filings and me a stubborn magnet. Who are you, they ask, and what have you done to make the brain remember your birth. I tell them I belong to the off key voice that invented dry land as a joke. Throw me, I say, and the sea will stop gnawing the hull. They try ropes and repentance first, because men hate simple solutions when a complicated misery will do. The ropes turn to water in their hands. The repentance falls through the planks like coins in a dream. They lift me. I bless them with a nod, the only liturgy I own, and they give me to the mouth below. I am bleeding down. So much blood. Black and colossal like a flood. The first touch of the sea is a forgiveness colder than law. It closes over my head without curiosity. I fall past the blue windows where the drowned look out, their hair like very polite weeds. A city of silence grows lighter as I descend, then goes out. When I am almost finished, the dream that has been following me all my life reaches me at last and becomes flesh. The whale is not a fish, not a cave, not a coffin; it is an argument about measure. It opens and the world narrows to a doorway. Inside is evening without horizon. The floor breathes. Ribs rise and fall like patient gates. I am carried forward through corridors of salt thought. The stomach sings a low psalm that knows my first name and has no use for my family name. I kneel because there is nothing else to do when a cathedral grows around you of its own appetite. I pray. The prayer is not words. It is a slow fire, and the smoke is gratitude. I am lifted on a wave that never breaks. There is a lover in here, bound in slick black, and when I open it I am reading my disobedience like a tide table. Beside it sits a lamp of spermaceti that no one lit. Around the lamp are saints who smell of rope and tar, men who learned theology from the brain and arithmetic from the price of oil. Job enters without knocking, still granular with ash; he does not lecture. A king in armour of question marks tilts his visor. A queen with a sea’s diadem looks for a mirror and finds only my eyes. Someone has misplaced a garden. We share it, pit by pit, fruit too luminous to eat. We don’t fuck. I sleep and wake with no change in the darkness. Time is a spine bending and unbending. Sometimes the ceiling lowers until my thought flattens to a scale. Sometimes the ceiling lifts and I become a tower with bells in my chest. I hear Nineveh breathing on the far shore of the whale, the way one hears a city through a wall at night: cooking, weeping, bargaining, the small bravado of loneliness. I promise the darkness that I will speak the burning word when the world is renewed. The darkness accepts my promise like an IOU written on skin. On the third day the whale takes a great instruction and obeys. The throat becomes a road. The road becomes a slo-mo cannon. I am shot into daylight wearing the smell of origin. The beach receives me with an old tenderness, as if I am a child who has returned from running too far, you know, the one who runs and runs and runs and runs. Sand clings to that story. The gulls circle to read it aloud. Nineveh stands up at my approach like a beast that slept too many centuries. I enter. The streets are ropes stretched between debts. The houses are ovens testing the faith of dough. I call out the small sharp word, the one that burned my hand. I do not make it fancy. I do not add oil. I say it until my mouth is salt. It goes into the people like a nail that refuses to stop at wood. Kings crouch in sackcloth, their crowns like overturned cauldrons. Animals fast with the gravity of saints. The city listens all at once the way the sea listens when a moon commands it. All the sky is covered in blood. The threat softens. Mercy, that vast animal with the enormous back, kneels in the square and offers itself as transport. Everyone climbs on without asking its destination. I watch and feel the familiar heat rise in my gut. I have practised catastrophe and they have replied with gratitude. I cannot carry both at once. I flee to the edge of the city where heat stands vertical and righteous men boil in their certainties. There a plant is thrown up by the night like a kindly lie. Its shade is a second skin. Under it I compose a psalm of small vindications. Morning ripens. Then a worm arrives, precise as all the scholars I know. It reads the plant to its root and leaves a punctuation mark in the dust. The sun puts its hand on my head and holds it there. An east wind unbuttons the day but it feels ominous like a rape. I ask to be subtracted from the world with the clean stroke that ends a sum. The request goes nowhere. A voice moves through the light without disturbing it. Do you do well to burn? Do you do well to be particular about your grief when a city has learned to breathe more slowly? The question becomes a mirror and in it I am two men: one who wants the great fish to be a gallows, and one who wants the world to keep its breath. The two men argue until they laugh. This is how to understand my laughter, my jokes, my humour. You often think it’s off key somehow. Well now you know. The voice says nothing more. The plant is gone. The shade remains for a moment like a memory of obedience, then folds into the heat. I walk back to the shore. The whale travels just under the surface, a continent that chooses its own maps. Sometimes it rises beneath a market and lifts the coins into a brief constellation. Sometimes it rises beneath a court and the scale tilts toward the side nobody weighed. Sometimes it rises beneath a nursery and the lullaby takes on the tone of geology. Sometimes it rises beneath me and the old room returns, damp and absolute. I smell its lamp. I taste its alphabet of oils. I hear the ribs speak in a language made of doors. I think then of the sailors who threw me. They must tell the story as a caution against paying passage to prophets. They must say the storm addressed them by name, and that a man tastes lighter than a cargo of resin. They must keep a small altar for a god who unknots ropes with wind. I bless them again, here where no one sees, with the nod that is my only talent. The sea accepts the blessing and stores it with the others in its deep museum. Nineveh begins to live as if rescued, which is to say it forgets magnificently. Children chase a hoop of sun along the wall. A butcher hangs up his knives like a mobile of moons. The king allows his crown to tarnish a little in public. The animals relapse into appetite with an innocence that could legislate for nations. From a balcony a woman pours water into a clay bowl, and for a heartbeat the water decides to be a mirror. In it I see the whale’s eye, a planet with brain. It blinks. The city keeps breathing. At night I compose a final prayer, not to be answered but to be stored where answers ferment. Maybe drunk by then I thank the deep for its patience, for the lamp that burned without witness, for the hymn that did not require my lips or cock. I forgive my anger because it is young. I ask to be used again, but only if the command is strange. A moth walks the rim of my bowl and looks like a scribe who forgot his ink. I sleep. In the morning, tar lies in curls on the beach like black fruit skins. Nets glisten, dripping their square logic. A boy draws a whale in the wet sand with a stick, then adds a door to its side. He opens the door and walks in. His friends follow, laughing. The tide comes and approves their architecture. I watch until the doorway fills with shine and erases itself, which is the sea’s favourite craft. I whisper the burning word one last time. It is smaller now, it fits the mouth easily. It does not scorch. It tastes of her breath. Somewhere far off, beneath a country of reefs, the great creature tilts and rests its head on the pillar that holds up the horizon. It is listening to the city. It does not love us, which is our salvation. It loves the pressure of depths and the way light behaves when swallowed. It keeps the world mixed by moving slowly through it, a law without code. Sometimes I think the voice rides inside it, not as a rider but as brain rides inside a season. When I think this, I am not afraid. I am only a man who has been inside a syllable and come out carrying its echo. Nineveh keeps breathing. The plant returns in another place, shading someone I will never meet. The worm studies other roots, a kind and necessary scholar. The wind grows ethical and then forgets. I stand with my feet in the skim of the tide and rehearse the distance between command and reply. It remains the length of a whale’s throat. I accept this. I accept that salvation sometimes smells like a harbour after rain. I accept that refusal too is a kind of prayer, and that the answer is enormous and indifferent and full of rooms.
Song The song begins in the throat before there is a mouth. It thrums along the spine like a tide trying on vertebrae. I wake with brine on my lips and a taste of iron that is not blood, only the old hinge on which water swings. The psalm rises of its own accord and moves through me like a tall animal in a narrow house, brushing all the doors with its flank. I follow with my hands out, ready to bless whatever it breaks. Out of the deep, yes, but the deep is inside the lung. Each breath is a rope lowered into a well. I pull, hand over hand, and bring up buckets of moon, buckets of weed, buckets of faint astonishment. My bones ring with a small bell set there by childhood. A voice counts my steps, kind as a ledger that writes itself in milk. When I stumble it lifts my chin with two fingers made of brain. I do not see a face. I see waves practising to be hands. I go down to the sea though the sea is already in me. The sand receives my feet as if measuring them for a sacrament. The wind spreads its garment. The garment smells of resin and decision. I lie back and let the foam button itself along my ribs. The prayer that comes is a slow animal, heavy with permission. Your rod and your staff are a pair of currents, one stern and one playful; they herd me between them, not to green pastures but to a wide, breathing blue table laid with salt fruit. I taste and see without choosing. The great back rolls just offshore. Not menace now, not judgement, only play. The psalm knows this creature by its daylight name, bright with delight. You made it for the sport of water, says the voice, and the word sport goes shy in my mouth, turns the colour of skin at twilight. The whale lifts a fin like a curtain and shows me the orchestra pit, all bones tuned to the key of low. I blush and laugh at once. The laughter arrives from the belly, velvet and tidal. It moves the beach a little, and the beach forgives me. Deep calls to deep where the spouts whistle. My pulse answers, an oar-stroke under the breast. Your waterfalls pass over me. I am rinsed of the number that has been following me since birth. I am numbered again, but now by a hand that counts like a lover, tracing freckles, counting ribs, marking the small tender hollows under the jaw. I want to sing the count back but the song is busy making me. At night the waters thicken to silk. The stars are stones dropped all day by shepherds with impeccable aim. I lie where the tide can reach without hurry. The psalm leans near and says the darkness is not dark to you. It smells of bread and animal. I turn onto my stomach. The sea presses its forehead to my spine and hums the old tune of recognition. I answer with a low ascent of breath, the kind that unlocks doors between rooms. The doors swing easily. The house wakes. Somewhere just beyond, the whale flips and the night groans with pleasure at its own size. If I ascend on the wings of morning, I rise through the spray made by a breath bigger than temples. If I settle on the farthest sea, a palm follows me along the underside of the water, and when I stop it rests there, large as a vow. You hem me in behind and before, says the song, and in the hem is a fine grit, and in the grit little opals of fish-eye light. I put one on my tongue and the tongue becomes obedient. I speak the short name I never give anyone. The name runs out across the flat and returns taller. Fearfully, wonderfully, a body is made. The psalm counts the threads in my skin like a weaver who loves the loom more than any cloth. It measures the darkness inside the body and does not flinch. It names the secret oils, the glands that leak small luxuries into the air. The whale noses the shallows and leaves a print the shape of consent. Its eye meets mine and holds without claim. I am seen the way a tidepool is seen by noon: complete, unashamed, briefly infinite. Enemies arrive late to the beach, formal as accountants. They bring balances, scales that glitter with cold arithmetic. They speak of justice that can only be thin. The psalm answers them with loud music. The strings go salt. The drums are barrels thumped by palms that smell of rope. In the noise the enemies shrivel to a polite abstraction. They step into the shade of their own careful words and are forgotten by the wind, which remembers everything else. I go down to the pit with the divers and come up with a jar of night. We pour it on the sand and it spreads a velvet tablecloth. On it we place melon, a knife, a cup of brackish sweetness, a curl of dried fish, a candle trapped in a glass so the wind can watch without ruining the flame. You prepare a table in the presence of my enemies, and by enemies the psalm means time, debt, the small interior judge who counts to ten before granting touch. The oil on my head is not poured, it gathers. It glows at the lip of the scalp and runs down willing, making grammar of shoulder, collarbone, breast. I shiver and the sentence lengthens. Mercy follows, not like a dog but like a tide that refuses to learn any other direction. Goodness too, though goodness is not shy here; it has a generous mouth and a sailor’s laugh. They track me through the dunes and find me even when I hide beneath the nets that smell of yesterday’s brain. I run to the house of the voice, which is a low room by the harbour where someone plays a small instrument with only three strings and makes it weep. I dwell there not forever, which is a word too tall for me, but for as long as the lamp holds its breath, which is long enough. On a day of high clear air we launch a skiff to follow the game of the giant. It shows the flat of its tail and the flat says yes. The psalm in my mouth grows bright as metal. The skiff climbs a mild hill of water and in the hollow we are alone with the wide. My hands shake with an ignorance that pleases me. I have no plan for what to do with joy. I let it handle me. It turns me gently and takes my throat, not to close it but to tune it. I sound the note and the note opens a room I did not know I owned. From that room I watch sorrow return, the ordinary kind, the housekeeping sorrow that keeps beds aired and cups upright. Count my wanderings, says the song, and the counting is a caress along the atlas of the foot. Place my tears in your bottle, and the bottle is a clear whale moving softly through the ribs, collecting brine where it finds it, not to store but to teach the lips the grammar of release. When the bottle is full the whale in the body turns and brushes its teeth along the cage and the cage sighs open. I am unbarred to myself. The sea breaks into hieroglyphs. Children read them and shout prophecies about crabs and clouds. I read them more slowly and find a letter addressed to the marrow. It says be small enough to be held by what you revere. I kneel, which is to articulate a hinge and trust it. The whale breathes again, and the breath sends a warm ribbon over my face, and I am named with a promise I am free to refuse. I do not refuse. At dusk the choir of insects begins, each throat a needle stitching night to night. The psalm stands behind me and unplaits my hair. Its hands are many. They smell of cedar, page-edge, wet rope, winter fat, bruised mint. It says the valley of shadow is only a corridor between rooms where the same feast waits, still warm. We walk the corridor very slowly, delaying the door for the joy of delay. When we enter the room the whale is there, dry as stone, a long hill on which the moon sits like a mild lamp. I lie along the slope and feel the faint tremor of distant thunder stored in flesh. I remember the belly, the lamp, the shelves that held my silence upright. I do not want to go back and I already have. Before sleep I let the voice number me again: scalp, temple, ear, throat, armpit, nipple, hip, thigh, behind the knee, ankle’s hard perfection, instep’s shy promise. The numbers fold into letters, and the letters into breath. The last word is not a word but a held exhalation. It climbs the rafters of the night and waits there, luminous as oil on water. When the dream comes it is not a scene but a pressure, the pressure of being surrounded by something that loves nothing and therefore keeps everything. I move inside it as a seal moves in light. If I make my bed in the deep, I find the bed already turned down, the sheet cool, the cover heavy as blessing. I sleep and the water sleeps around me, and somewhere the giant turns with the unembarrassed grace of vastness and plays, because it was made to, because joy is a kind of knowledge older than law. I enter the lover through a mouth of smoke. The temple is breathing. The hem of a robe fills the room like fog that has learned ceremony. Above, the six-winged burn. Two wings to hide the face from a brightness that will not be domesticated, two for the feet that remember clay, two to hover in a grammar of heat. Their thrice holy is not a number, it is a hammer on an anvil made of air. The doorposts shudder as if the building were a lung refusing to be a wall. Woe to me, I say, which means the architecture has recognised its trespasser. A coal is carried on a tong and then not on a tong but on the creature’s sure hand. It touches my mouth. The world becomes taste. My tongue, a seal. My lips, a harbour the tide has just polished. The burn is instruction written in the alphabet of nerves. I do not cry out. I allow the mark to take my speech the way a shoreline allows the line to redraw it. Here am I. It is the first sentence I have owned. It is answered by distance. Go, says the voice, and speak to the people who keep their eyes open the way a locked door is open. Tell them the field is already aflame, tell them the stump still lives, tell them the root keeps a secret pulse. I nod, and nod again, because consent is heavy and must be lifted twice. I walk into a city measured by siege lines that smell of chalk and vinegar. The markets bargain with dust. Children play with the husks of certainties. A king sits on a throne of pending news and dreams of alliances that taste like iron filings. In the night the coastline hears the approach of ships whose sails are arithmetic. Tarshish returns, carrying mirrors of beaten silver in which no face stays long. The mirrors want to be water. The water wants to be lifted as praise. I stand at a gate where traffickers of prophecy come and go with receipts. I do not sell. I pronounce comfort as if it were a bell that could be rung only in a desert. A voice answers somewhere behind the horizon, clearing its throat into canyons. Prepare a way, it says, and every valley bows its head and every hill lifts its skirt and the rough becomes smooth enough for feet that have never learned to hesitate. I watch road appear out of merely wanting. The sea draws near with a scholar’s patience. It presents its argument in successive waves, each footnote larger than the text. I speak to it as if to an elder. You have been split for slaves and sewn up for kings and still you keep a sweetness at the core of your salt. The sea declines my praise gracefully. Far out a long back turns with the slow confidence of an empire that belongs to no map. Leviathan remembers and keeps its counsel. I am shown in vision a vineyard that sang to itself and then learned envy. I am shown a city where the beds are too narrow for lies. I am shown a woman in travail and the child that arrives already naming the moon. I am shown a parched land that swallows a thin stream and gives back orchards. I am shown the poor with oars in their hands, rowing a table of bread through streets knee-deep in light. These are not metaphors. They are rehearsals. The night brings the Assyrian like a swarm that believes itself a single animal. Its breath is a ledger. Numbers step through the fields and take possession of wheat that has already been eaten by intention. I am told to stand on the wall and call out the names that are doors. Wonderful Counsellor. Mighty God. Everlasting Father. Prince of Peace. The titles walk ahead of the morning as if the sun had deputised them. Men fall, not from arrows, but from the discovery that they have always been tired. When the city sleeps I am taken to the sea again. This time the horizon tilts like a cup. The moon licks the lip and leaves mercy glowing there. The creature comes up almost ashamed of its size. Its eye is a coin stamped with brain. Its breath lays a warm cloth across my face. O sword, rouse yourself against the coiled thing, sings the wind down in the reeds where it has hidden a long time. Yet the sword does not rise. It merely balances on its own idea and thinks. The beast turns with courtly care and sinks, trailing on the surface a line of pearls that is only air remembering where it came from. In the desert a highway grows like a muscle. It runs from wilderness to city with a sure pulse, and on it walk the ransomed, whose ankles learn quickly how to agree with joy. The blind learn the economy of brightness and waste it extravagantly. The deaf are given storms first, so that quiet will later taste of honey. The lame discover that dancing is merely walking that has been forgiven. Water breaks out of the ground as if the ground had been pregnant with it. The jackal forgets the law of scarcity and sleeps. I argue with idols that smell of fresh wood. Their makers stroke them with a fondness that ought to belong to children. See, I say, how you dress them and they are cold, how you carry them and they are heavy, how you feed them and they do not thank you. The carvers shrug, tired men with good hands. They look at me as if I were asking them to peel the sky. I bless their hands anyway. The blessing wanders off to look for a use and eventually finds a widow, who needs a jar refilled till she can think again. A city prepares a feast for those who never received invitations. The table is long as noon. A sheet is pulled from the face of death and it is revealed to be a mask only, worn by a hunger that has already eaten itself. Tears are wiped with a cloth that smells of cedar, and the cloth is folded and kept, because memory is an altar that loves tidy offerings. I drink wine that has forgotten grapes and remember a boy who once tasted light and called it milk. I am sent to a sea road where traders count syllables for their price. There I sing a song about a cornerstone dropped from a sky no mason could claim. The stone fits beneath the city like a new heart. Men place their ears to the pavement and hear a deep slow beat, and they rest, not because they are good, but because rest is a command written earlier than guilt. The law curls up at our feet and sleeps like a satisfied dog. Rahab is named, the boaster dragon, and the name goes through the court like a fish’s shadow through a bowl. Awake, awake, says the song, arm of the Lord, and the sleeve of night is rolled back to the elbow. I see again the creature cut for passage, the river shamed into road, the pursuers drowned in their own appetite. But I also see the gentle hand on the monster’s brow, a pressure that is not murder, a reminder that even rage holds a little music. The hand lifts. The brow lowers. Peace is not permanent, which is why it tastes so clean. The poor are told to buy without money, which is the only way they have ever bought. The covenant is described as a mouth that will not tire of kissing. The mountains are informed that they shall burst into song and they practise by throwing shadows. The trees clap with leaves that remember when they were water. I walk through this orchard and blush, because the air lingers on my skin as if it had business there. The blush warms the coal-mark on my lip and it answers like a small star. The wolf learns a new grammar and lies down with the lamb, which is not a miracle so much as a correction. The child plays by the hole of the old serpent and invents a game that is not conquest. The earth fills with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, which is to say wholly and with movement. I wade into that knowledge to the waist and wait. It rises to the breast, the throat, the mouth. I open and it enters as if entering a house long promised. There is no drowning. Only speech that feels like being kissed from the inside. At last I am old in the vision that never ages. The city has a light that needs no lamp. Foreigners build the walls with a courtesy that surprises them. The gates do not learn how to close. On the quay the ships of Tarshish arrive again, but now their cargo is not mirrors. They bring sons and daughters standing at the rail, eyes bright as harbours after rain. The sea is pleased with this traffic. It strokes the hulls with a father’s absentminded tenderness. I return to the temple that breathes. The coal on the altar sleeps like a red animal. I touch my lip and the mark hums. Who will go, asks the voice once more, as if not knowing were part of the intimacy. Here am I, I say, and the words taste of salt and lamp-oil. The doors tremble, polite. The floor tilts like a tide holding its breath. If the creature is out there it is playing, not with us but with joy itself, which is older than we are and kinder. I step into the smoke, which opens as water opens for a body that does not fear it. The road appears again, straight through the middle of what had decided to be barren. I follow, singing, with the burn in my mouth for a compass and the sea at my back, patient as an age.
Holland’s Plutarch’s Morals The lover opens like a portico flooded at high tide. Morals is a colonnade where the sea has taken up residence, whispering to the marble as if teaching it to breathe. I pass between pillars glazed with salt. At the far end a priest of good sense offers me water in a shallow dish. The water shows a spine turning under darkness, then steadies into my face. I drink both images, which is to say I promise to be corrected. A small brass E hangs from the ceiling, letter and omen. Five, say the elders, and also Thou art. The vowel hums the way a shell hums when it remembers its tenant. I put the E to my ear and hear a deep animal rehearsing assent. Perhaps the letter is a fin folded into grammar. Perhaps Delphi is only a whale that has learned to speak through stone. The tripod trembles as if three ribs were touching. Plutarch approaches with the temperate step of a man who has argued with kings and never lost his appetite. He carries a lamp that smells of winter fat and judgement withheld. We walk. He names the rooms we pass with a modesty that would embarrass wind. On the Eating of Flesh, he says, and a door opens onto a kitchen where knives sleep respectfully. It is not murder to abstain, he suggests; it is music. The whale rolls just beyond the threshold, a tremendous lyre strung with currents. I place my palm to the wet and feel the chords ascend my arm until the shoulder is an instrument. A shy chord answers, maternal and lawless. I blush and call the blush philosophy. We enter a hall where anger is kept on a leash. Plutarch strokes its head, which is hot and courteous. He speaks of bridles and reins, of how a man may sit his own storm. Outside, a spout lifts like a column. The spray falls as a fine correction upon my tongue. Taste teaches me restraint faster than maxims. The great back heaves and the leash within me slackens without breaking. I am paid in quiet. Another chamber: On Superstition. A crowd is kneeling to phantoms with expensive hands. Fear breeds in the folds of their garments like damp. Plutarch opens a window. The room fills with noon. He prefers reverence that stands upright. The whale slides by, dark as an eclipse that refuses panic. Its eye looks in, unpurchased. I forget to be afraid of what has no desire for me. The forgetting is a clean bed. We come to the daemon’s room. It is small and always twilight. A murmur lives there like a second pulse. Do not, it says, and the No is not refusal but a path spared. Socrates turns his head slightly toward a harbour he will never sail from. I recall the belly and its lamp, the soft veto that gave me back my breath. The daemon is a fin brushed along the keel from beneath, a warning that arrives as touch rather than thunder. It moves the course a finger’s width, which in time is a continent. Now the oracles’ silence. Priests lounge like retired winds. The tripod cools its teeth. Plutarch wonders whether god has grown economical with syllables, or whether we have swollen past our proper listening. While he thinks, the sea breaks into low laughter. Oracles are not gone, they have migrated to the skin. When the whale surfaces it writes on us with warm spray, a script the humble learn at once and the learned learn later. The letters evaporate but the sentence remains, lodged in the hinge of the jaw, in the pace of a heart that has dismissed hurry. We walk beneath frescoes of Isis and Osiris, where a body is divided that it may be remembered. Plutarch gestures: look how the goddess gathers members with a tenderness that embarrasses theology. She holds the sea as if it were a child that has decided to be enormous. The whale’s mouth opens like a sanctuary and closes like an oath. Somewhere a river finds its name and enters salt without shame. Resurrection is not a miracle, it is a tide-table kept in the dark pocket of the moon. The Symposiacs unfold, tables laid with questions, cups lifted to the health of measured disagreement. Wine repeats the sun in little bowls. We sit with men who laugh with care, and women who can turn a metaphor by its ear until it purrs. Someone asks whether the sea or the land is more hospitable to truth. A youth says the sea, because it returns what it cannot digest. An elder says the land, because it lets us bury what would otherwise embarrass us. I say the whale, which keeps both laws in one moving cathedral, and the table does not mock me. A hand under the board finds mine and squeezes like a tide choosing a rock. The psalm of the skin begins. We continue to talk. On the Delay of Divine Vengeance: a ledger that refuses to close at dusk. Plutarch writes patience on the air with two fingers. The letters linger like lantern-smoke. Vengeance delays, he says, because ripeness is a serious craft. I look seaward and see the creature sounding, slow as the writing of a will. When it rises at last it brings with it a drowned sentence now fit to be read. We read and are amended, which is sweeter than being broken. On Tranquillity of Mind: a courtyard of shade where water says the same thing again and again until we understand it. Plutarch advises small harbours in the day, brief moorings of attention. The whale passes far out, a punctuation that ends no one’s thought but steadies everyone’s grammar. I lay my ear to the bench and hear through wood the under-muscle of the world. The erotic arrives as a breeze that knows precisely where to move the garment. Nothing is revealed. Everything consents. We pause before a closet of devices: harps, compasses, bridles, nets. Curiosity stands here in her nightgown, eager to put on armour. Plutarch smiles at her and removes the hook from her hand. Ask, he says, but do not rake. The difference is a mercy. I remember the iron question that smoked over Job’s sea, the line held straight by men who wished to be saved by geometry. The whale had breathed and turned away. The turning was an ethics. I bow to it belatedly. Marriage counsel next, where two are pestered into one by a chorus of kindly spies. Plutarch speaks of concord not as sameness but as a fitting of edges that allows heat. The sea demonstrates. Two long swells meet and for a moment travel together, larger than themselves, then pass on with gratitude. I think of a back gliding alongside a boat at dusk, indifferent and companionable. The mind learns from the body without boasting. In a niche hangs a little treatise against the flatterer. It gleams like a clean blade. Plutarch says the true friend is sand in the mouth of pride, a grit that teaches the pearl. I nod, remembering how the beast’s tongue, rough as a road, once pressed my shoulder and made a new obedience there. Praise that smooths everything is only oil. Oil burns; it does not nourish. We return to the E. It sways a little, pleased with our circuit. Five again, and Thou art again, and also the breath half-opened when a swimmer breaks the skin of the sea. Plutarch looks seaward, not to own, only to confirm. The horizon is politely endless. Far out the giant plays, not idly, for play is an art of great exactitude. Its flukes rise like twin tablets and fall without legislation. The splash writes briefly on the palace of air and we receive the law the way the chest receives a cool cloth. Evening grows charitable. The colonnade fills with that animal dusk which knows our names but will not call them. Plutarch sets down his lamp where the breeze cannot bully it. He says, almost shyly, that virtue is not a ladder but a harbour of chosen winds. I think of sails sleeping furled, of ribs that do not envy wings, of bellies that keep lamps for the sake of strangers. I think of the daemon’s small No, of patience that ripens, of coal on the lip, of a letter that is also assent. When I step back into the street, the city is washed to the ankle with a tide that forgot to retreat. Children run their hands along the wet stone and lick their fingers with the solemnity of acolytes. I walk down to the quay where the ropes hold ships as gently as mothers hold the wrists of dreamers. The sea breathes. The whale answers. Between their two immensities a human measure is permitted. It is neither thin nor loud. It is the soft lustre left on the skin after thought has bathed. I carry that lustre like a coin I will never spend. In the dark I taste brass and distant oil. The E hums behind my teeth. I practise the vowel until it becomes a fin in the mouth, a supple instrument to lean on as I enter sleep. Beneath the pillow the world turns, patient as a sermon that believes us capable of hearing it. The back rolls. The spray touches the cheek of the night. Plutarch’s lamp goes out at the right moment. The morals hold. The sea keeps our secrets by enlarging them beyond theft.
Holland’s Pliny She opens like a shoreline at low tide, everything exposed and still speaking. Holland’s Pliny arranges the world upon the sand with a patient hand, shells for syllables, weeds for conjunctions, a dead starfish for the full stop that is never quite final. I walk within the alphabet and it knits itself under my feet, brisk as surf. Ocean is the first entry and the last; between them is a bestiary of decisions. He begins with the moon’s rope upon the waters. She draweth, saith he, and therefore we come and go without consent. I feel the pull in the gums and the groin, a law older than ink. The sea lifts its shoulder and I am lifted with it, a marginal note stuck to a strong page. Far out the giant rolls, consenting to be counted as one among the natural histories. Balaena, he writes, a mountain with a throat. I taste the old oil on the word and the word warms in the mouth like bread. Around the mountain swim precise furies. Orca, the butcher, black blade wreathed in winter breath, delighting in the calf. Pristis, the saw with its patient argument. Xiphias, the sword that would punctuate the world. Echineis, small arrestor of voyages, which stayeth a ship with no more than a thinking mouth. I love the remora for its polite tyranny. I have been held so, by a palm at the breastbone that said Wait in a grammar beyond obedience. The ship stood quiet as a sin remembered at the right time. When the little fish let go, we had learned a new definition of speed. Pliny plucks marvels like cockles. Amber, succinum, drawn from the German sea as if the pines themselves had learned to weep into permanence. He sets it in the sun and the sun applauds with bees. I roll a bead upon my tongue and it gathers straws of memory, tiny grasses of yesterday’s voice, the lint of hands that touched and withdrew. Purple too, the grave dye, pressed from the murex’s throat as if speech itself could stain cloth. He tells how one dog, biting a shell upon the shore, stained his lips and led a king to royal garments. I think of the whale’s lamp, the way colour spilled inside me when its breath laid a shawl on my face. The robe was not for rule but for confession. The catalogue grows intimate. Sea-hare, deadly to kings and to women with secrets. Sea-mouse, a velvet curiosity that teaches us the politics of shimmer. Sea-horse, that steps like a letter learning to be a number. Remedies follow, the calm delight of them. Oil of dolphin against gripings. Ash of cuttle-bone to polish the tooth. A vinegar that breaks the stubborn pearl so a widow may drink her husband’s last gift and finally sleep. I try these on the tongue of thought; each works with a gentleness that would embarrass steel. He writes that pearls are conceived when the shell-fish gape at heaven and swallow dew. I lie on the warm rock and open my mouth to the night. The dew enters as a cool lover and the throat closes with courteous surprise. In the morning there is grit beneath the tongue and tenderness at the root of words. When I speak, a small weight rolls there, lustrous as refusal. I keep it; I do not sell. The sea approves this poverty. The halcyon days arrive on cue, a fortnight of domestic miracle. The bird lays upon the water, and the water, taught by a feather, forgets its profession of trouble. The beach lies on its back with paws tucked. In that lull the whale plays with a discretion that feels erotic because it is not mine. He turns, showing the mother-of-pearl of his silence, and the air sheds a slow garment of joy. I find myself cataloguing the gestures of pleasure as if they were herbs: a breath that lengthens, a skin that remembers to be porous, a pulse that counts only to two. Pliny’s sentences are tidy households where prodigies hang their cloaks without complaint. Yet he writes too of the monstrous births of islands, of volcanoes deranging the sky. He does not know Vesuvius as his nephew would, but ash is already in his ink like a future. He says the earth bringeth forth suddenly, and sometimes takes back. The sea nods, having rehearsed this act since before speech. I watch a sandbar appear out of mere insistence, then leave without goodbye. The whale passes over the place, reading it with the soft alphabet of his belly. He notes that the magnet draweth iron, as amber attirreth chaff. I hold a lodestone in my palm and feel the faint dream of direction. The needle quivers like a fish at prayer. Beneath me the animal world aligns. Hooks turn of their own will towards the steel that would betray them. I think of the moralists and laugh gently. What is virtue but a tide that knows its moon. What is vice but a current too proud to turn. The body, honest as ever, follows the needle with a humility that tastes a little of milk. In the lover of winds he speaks of Auster’s wet hand and Boreas’ clean blade. Eurus arrives scented with old cities and their thieves. Notus is a medic who prescribes sleep. The sea considers these names and remains unpersuaded. Its vocabulary is broader, its grammar older. Yet the whale honours each with a gesture: a fast dive for the knife-wind, a slow rise for the opiate, a long side-glide for the antique thief. I take note, a scholar of muscles. He is exact about fog-banks and about the deceit of distances. Islands float that ought not to. Men throw harpoons at cloud. The cloud returns them politely dressed in rainbow. He advises not to trust water that dazzles, nor women who promise to be islands. I misread him with pleasure and trust both, discovering that all good counsel becomes erotic when taken slowly. A fog arrives; we enter it; it teaches our hands new verbs. Pliny is proud of naming the cuttle’s ink, the torpedo’s numb benediction, the goose that grows on trees beyond the end of maps, a decent falsehood folded into a larger truth about hunger. He tends to the edible, the curative, the useful. Yet every so often his pen lifts and he admits delight. The dolphin swims for play, saith he, and loveth music, and the boy that calleth him by name. I call the sea by its private name and it lifts a fold to show me the dark velvet pocket where it keeps afternoons. I place my hand there. It closes. We both are improved. At last he returns to shores and markets, to weights and measures of fish that come ashore more doctrine than flesh. The merchants haggle in a tongue of scales. He lists prices the way a priest lists sins, careful and almost tender. The spermaceti is dear, the amber dearer, the purple dearer still. What costs most, he does not say, is the breath itself when boiled into lamps. I know this. The light is fine and steady, the page clear, the room improved; yet some large animal has traded a thought for our convenience. I bend over the lamp and the flame bows back, courteous, unaccusing. Night takes the encyclopaedia into its sleeve. I close the covers and the beach is once more merely beach. Still, the letters cling to my ankles like wet sand. The remora thought lingers at the breastbone and bids me wait till the moon decides. The magnet sleeps under my tongue, drawing a thin taste of iron from the name I have not yet spoken. Far out, the orca rehearses its cruelty, the sword rehearses punctuation, the saw rehearses law; and between these instruments of clarity the great unmastered back lifts and lowers, undissected, unnamed enough, playing at the edge of history with the patience of delight. I lie down where the halcyon has flattened the sea and let Pliny’s good order drowse me. The index runs like a rosary through the fingers of my brain. Amber, anchor, anemone, angel of the reef; baleen, ballast, balm; coral, current, cure. When sleep comes it is a tide cut with entries, little headings on the foam. In the middle of it the whale enters, not as a marvel but as the paragraph in which the lover forgets itself and becomes a body. I am written there, a slight italic hand between two dignified capitals. The page is wet, yes, but keeps its shape. In the margin Pliny has penned, in Holland’s temperate English, this simple gloss: here the ocean playeth with a man and doth him no harm.
Took’s Lucian The lover laughs before she opens. Lucian’s pages are doors fitted with hinges of mockery, and every hinge is greased with desire. I step in and the air grows bright as a coin freshly bitten. Hermes is at the counter, weighing souls like figs, winking when the scale insists on comedy. “Tickets for the moon,” he says, “or for the belly.” I choose the latter, since bellies keep better time. A breeze with a barber’s hands shaves the sea to a gleam. Our ship skips like a joke told by someone beautiful. Eros stands in the prow with a little bow that shoots questions instead of arrows. Each question enters skin and becomes warmth. On the third day a wall of water rears up, a city of blue without windows, and the mouth inside it opens, exact and leisurely. We pass under the lintel of lip and the world closes behind us with the courteous sound of a curtain drawn. Within, the whale is Lucian’s theatre, lit by lamps that burn on the oils of laughter. Streets of cartilage, piazzas of velvet, balconies of rib with lovers leaning; vendors hawk salt figs and complicated kisses; philosophers debate whether the tongue is a citizen or a foreign power. A courtesan with eyes the colour of forgiveness sells me a sentence to wear around my neck. Menippus arrives barefoot, carrying insolence like a lantern. He asks for change for a drachma of truth. No one has any; we barter in blushes. Eros walks ahead and the town arranges itself. A fountain leaps from a gland and falls back as rain named by the citizens for various saints of appetite. The Dialogue of the Gods is performed on a stage of slick muscle. Zeus cannot keep a straight thunderbolt. Aphrodite swears by the seam of her thigh that she never promised constancy, only light. Hera’s jealousy smokes like myrrh. In the upper gallery Charon sells programmes and grins at anyone who thinks the river is elsewhere. We drink to him from cups cut out of baleen; the rims hum in the mouth like polite thunder. There is a market for lives. “Fresh careers!” the auctioneer cries, “philosopher barely used, tyrant with decorative remorse, poet with reliable hunger.” The whale heaves and the bids rise with the floor. I try on a skeptic and find it fits like a glove made of mirrors. A Cynic coughs and the cough is a sermon. Menippus buys a pair of wings second-hand and tells me later they work best when you stop deserving them. At dusk the True History unrolls itself like silk, and from it slides the moon, a white theatre boat with gardens in its wake. We watch soldiers of garlic battling soldiers of cheese, and the moon-king adjudicating with a spoon. Eros sits beside me and breathes into my ear a promise made of temperature. The air thickens to kindness. Brand-new conjunctures sprout on the tongue. The whale’s heart lifts under us like a drum we forgot we were lying upon. All philosophy condenses to a sentence that smells of skin and literacy. Night moves, ferrying gods to their trysts. Dialogues of Courtesans begin in shadows as soft as law’s shoulder. Their laughter is scholarship. One tells how she charged extra when a client spoke in hexameters; another says the sea taught her scansion better than any school. They ask me what I want and I answer: to be read aloud by someone indifferent to my virtue. Approval arrives like a warm current around the knees. Menippus borrows my ear and flies it to the upper air. We look down upon systems that sweat certainty. From above, dogma is merely tidy agriculture; from within, it crushes grass. We descend laughing, singed with clarity. Zeus, out of coins, rains a small shower of ambergris that perfumes debate and pays for wine. Hermes pockets two pieces, because messengers need souvenirs. A storm of satire blows through the town, unroofing pretence, leaving the bodies of assertions clean and shivering. Even Eros blushes and sharpens his little questions. They now fly deeper and return slower, carrying answers that refuse to stand alone. The whale, amused, shifts us all closer together. Shoulders touch. Someone’s prayer mistakes my throat for its home and is not evicted. In the morning Lucian escorts us to the lip. “Remember,” he says, “ridicule is the towel after the bath, not the bath.” Eros nods solemnly, then trips me toward the light. We are spilled onto the sea, oiled and talkative. The whale leaves a long parenthesis on the surface and closes it with a fluke. The sentence inside is untranslatable but widely understood. Back on shore the gods change back into brain, the courtesans into poetry that will not admit authors, the philosophers into stall-keepers selling clean knives. I carry with me a small ledger of pleasures that owe nothing and pay in astonishment. When I open it, the pages smell faintly of lamp-light and brine. At night I dream a last dialogue: Eros and the Whale. “Do you love them?” Eros asks. “No,” says the Whale, “I keep them buoyant.” “Is that not love?” “It is play.” “And play?” “The only serious thing.” They laugh, and the laugh rocks me the way a harbour rocks a boat that has learned, after satire, the right way to stay.