Whale (Part 2)
Sleeve Notes
Lovers nap along the walls like animals that trust the hand that wields them. On the rafters Latin inscriptions move like ripe wheat in the breeze and the breeze behaves as if it had been taught the secrets of masturbation by a library. What do I know? he asks, and the question opens like a window. Through it I see the sea practising scepticism, agreeing and withdrawing in the same motion, a tide that votes for everything and nothing with equal courtesy. Far out a back turns, undecided as a wise man, certain as a mountain. The whale is an essay with blood startled and black in it, a self trying itself upon the water. I lean my forearms on the sill and the salt speaks to the skin in a grammar older than doctrine. Montaigne’s hand moves over the page without hurrying and the ink brightens as if it were remembering its origin in smoke and tree. He writes of custom, that second nature, and how it saddles us so quietly that we mistake its bridle for a birthmark. The sea nods. A long swell moves like a law that has forgotten who authored it. When the whale surfaces the spray baptises my forehead with a cool impartiality. I laugh. Custom loosens a little. The page keeps writing me. He turns to friendship, which is not a market and not a sermon, only two minds walking and giving each other shade. He names La Boétie and the room changes colour. The light leans closer and learns to whisper. In the cove a pair of dolphins write their brief arguments along the skin of the water and each accepts correction with joy. The whale hangs deeper, a vast witness that refuses applause. I feel a palm against the centre of the chest, not to push, only to specify the place where speaking becomes touch. He writes of cannibals and the neat unsavage virtues of those we misname. The shore answers with a bowl of fruit and a blade honed on patience. We eat. The fruit bleeds a little sun into the mouth. The blade slices the noon into manageable pieces. The whale sends up a warm fog that smells of fat and iron, and the fog wraps strangers until we are busy learning each other’s names with a care that embarrasses the map. On coaches now, on the theatre of travel, on the way bodies are carried, shaken, tenderised into recognitions that sit more clearly than ideas. We ride. The path is the thin consent between stone and hoof. Every turn proposes a difference and our joints assent. I think of the belly where I once learned the topography of patience. That coach had ribs for windows, a lamp that praised the oil it burned, a driver who was only pressure. The memory descends like brain. Montaigne nods, understanding that to write is also to ride in the dark with good appetite. He writes of experience and at once the room grows edible. The chair licks the back of my knees with comfort. The ink tastes slightly of winter apples. The margin smells of a dog asleep. I drop my carefulness as a swimmer drops clothing and wade into the page. Experience is not a proof, he says, it is a diet. I am fed the salt at the root of the tongue. The whale lifts and dips and the low rhyme of that movement moves into the wrists, into the waist, into the breath where it meets the spine. I am corrected into pleasure. He writes of idleness, which is not a sin but a workshop. In idleness thoughts breed like fish in clean water. The tower hums. The sea takes the afternoon off and practises being a mirror. In the mirror the whale’s eye is a coin stamped with patience. The coin buys silence that is not empty. I spend it on the small labour of taking my own pulse and deciding to slow it. Montaigne examines fear as one would examine a bruise, neither proud nor ashamed. He takes its colour in daylight, records the heat around it, presses gently to learn whether it wishes to speak. Across the fields a brain front approaches with the gait of a magistrate who has remembered mercy. The sea darkens. The whale is a courthouse suddenly kind. I enter and confess without indictment. The echo returns a verdict made of breath. It says enough. On sleep he grows almost erotic, so near does he come to the edge where the body persuades time to behave. The bed is a boat that knows the channel by heart. The sheets are a tide just reaching the ankle. A slow warmth builds with the prudence of a just city. When the whale turns far out the turn is felt in the joints as a legal reform, generous and exact. I sleep and the room, pleased, sleeps around me. He writes about smells, that archive of intimate jurisprudence. The tower keeps thyme in its stones and the ink keeps smoke. The sea brings up from the deep a sweetness made of rot and cathedral. The whale breathes and the breath lays on my face a cloth damp with knowledge. All arguments become pores. All pores vote yes. Montaigne laughs, not to mock, only to tidy the air. We speak of death with a lucidity that refuses to be cold. He says to practise it is to practise freedom. The window shows a line of foam passing without ownership. The whale rises once, clearly, then sinks in a curve full of consent. I understand then that the creature’s play is a rehearsal for leaving and that joy is not an alibi but a competence. The body hears this. It loosens where the shoulders hoard brain. It arranges the hips as if hospitality were a craft. The question returns and sits between us like a cat that knows Latin. What do I know. I know the mouth of the sea by its temperature. I know the speed of a blush and the weight of a pardon. I know the lamp that burns without accountants. I know the small daemon that places a finger on the plan and makes a narrow path through it, fit for feet that have remembered humility. I know the back that lifts and lowers beyond property, making grammar for our astonishments. Evening. Montaigne closes his lover with the gentleness one uses for a living thing. He pours a little wine and a little water. The mixture does not argue. We step onto the gallery that circles the tower like a calm thought. Below, cattle amend the field by standing in it beautifully. The sea is a large version of this correction. The whale, somewhere inside its own coherence, plays with a serenity that teaches the hands to slow. Eros rises, not particular, only general, a tide that finds the ankles even in towers and shows the way down in case we have forgotten stairs. I leave with no doctrine except a more fitting skin. The inscriptions over the door glow as if translated by dusk. I read them aloud to the path. The path approves and becomes road. On the road a faint salt damp remains, the kind that lingers on a lip that has been thoroughly argued into consent. The sea breathes. The page will be ready in the morning. The whale will turn as it always turns, with patient appetite, and the mind, if it is awake, will learn again to lean on that curve as on a good sentence.
Rabelais, The lover arrives laughing wine through her teeth. Rabelais sets the table until the table becomes a ship. Gargantua enters, stomach first, a moon of appetite drawing all tides to itself. Pantagruel follows with a thirst that baptises every sentence. Panurge curls at their feet like a question that wants to be married. I sit among pitchers that sweat like strong men and cheeses the size of provinces. The air smells of an anatomy lesson that has decided to be a feast. They bless the bread with noises learned from the stable and the choir. The knife is a sacrament that explains grain to the mouth. When the first cup is lifted the sea draws near, obedient to its own thirst. We drink and our bellies ring with bells that were monks yesterday. A friar laughs, the laugh becomes a tide, and the tide picks up the long back of a creature that agrees to be joyful in our presence. The whale rises to the lip of the harbour and exhales a warm psalm that oils the night. No one is improved, everyone is enlarged. The abbey we enter does not rebuke. Thélème lifts its skirts to run. Its rule fits the body the way salt fits sweat. Do what thou wilt, say the walls, and the sentence is not libertine but musical, a mode in which dissonance is hospitality. Cloisters open like mouths. Windows behave like eyes finally convinced. In the refectory the margins of scripture are occupied by drawings of pears and buttocks and instruments of obscure delight. A novice writes a theorem on the rind of a melon and eats it to prove his faith. I am given a key shaped like a spoon. I open my hunger and find a library inside. Panurge begins his catalogues, small floods of things that jostle and shine. Which signs foretell a cuckold crown, which omens excuse it, which horns are harmonious, which viols play under the hat while the husband is absent. He asks each oracle and pays each in fear. The answers smell of rope and laughter. In the courtyard a herd of kids practice butting a painted moon. The moon wobbles and enjoys it. The whale watches from outside the wall with an eye that is only brain reheated, and the eye seems to say that horns are only music stiffened by pride. We set sail because the cup commands it. Ships are barrels that learned geometry. The crew are scholars of thirst. On the yard a monk hangs to dry after a baptism in Burgundy. The wind is a midwife who approves of excess in moderation. We cross an inlet where the water has learned satire. Islands grin with too many teeth. A crowd of litigants wave writs that are only eels tied into knots. Our pilot consults the chance of birds, which sit on the rigging and discuss metaphysics in crumbs. Storm. The sky puts on a codpiece of lightning and struts. Rain arrives with the manners of a thousand chamber pots suddenly sincere. The ship groans like a saint with a pleasant habit. Pantagruel stands in the waist and speaks a word that is both benediction and recipe. The word thickens the air, the storm chews it, and the world is seasoned into calm. From the deep a hill lifts, patient and amused. We pass over a mouth that might be a harbour and might be a sermon. For a quarter of an hour we are inside a cathedral of breath, our sails lit by a lamp without wick. Panurge swears fidelity to everything. The whale turns and releases us the way a jovial judge releases truants, with a tap and a lesson none of us can repeat without blushing. At an island where every citizen is a parchment we read the law on their skin and are charged ink by the pint. At another, words grow on hedges and must be harvested before frost, otherwise they drop and curse the soil. We pick a basket of warm adjectives and stew them with garlic. Our tongues become scholars and our throats become cloisters. At night the captain toasts the patronage of bottles. He names each by its virtues, the candid, the argumentative, the conciliatory, the bottle that forgives debts, the bottle that invents new ones. We drink the list and sleep like magistrates absolved by nap. Epistemon tells us of his visit below, the great reversal where emperors serve soups and poets collect fees. The tale is medicine poured into laughter. While he speaks a certain tenderness crosses the deck, a midship breeze made of fingers. It pauses at the lip of my ear and says we do not know how to die because we do not yet know how to swallow joy without biting it. The whale breaches once, a parenthesis in which the sentence of the sea takes a breath, then closes. The deck dampens with consent. Pantagruelion is praised until the hemp blushes. The rope learns the stratagems of friendship, binding without injury, flattering the mast into steadiness. Nets practice grammar, conjunctions of knot and loop, capable of catching both fish and argument. I put a cord between my teeth and the taste is of fields and of ships, the civic flavour of things that are willing. The whale noses the cord, approves, and writes a small wet signature on my wrist. At last we come to the Bottle, the oracle whose mouth is round and whose speech is liquid. A priestess lifts us with her voice into the cool. The walls glitter with the good mould. The vault has the shape of a satisfied throat. We listen to the word that has been travelling all this way to meet us, a word poured not spoken. Trinc, says the Bottle, and the syllable enters like a kiss that was promised by a festival. Drink, and also cut, and also ring, and also join. The word is a wheel. It turns inside us and grinds our fears into flour. Panurge dances like a man with new ankles. Gargantua hums like a hive. Pantagruel smiles with the slow authority of a harbour. I drink and the drink finds the old lamp within, the one that once burned in a belly where thought took its time. The lamp flares and the body remembers its good work, to receive, to change, to give back warm. The whale glides at the cave mouth, not to mock ceremony, only to recognise a cousin. We tilt our cups to the sea. The sea replies by not drowning us. There is a love here that is not pious and not cruel. It moves the hips and corrects the grammar. It makes the mouth more accountable. Eros rises, apron on, cook and physician, preparing a dish of patience with a sauce of laughter. He spoons it between the ribs. The heart eats with both hands. The mind wipes its chin and learns to say yes without bargaining. We sail home along a coast that thinks in proverbs. On one beach a giant child writes his name in urination and the letters run to the sea like small monks late for office. Rabelais grins through the clouds and recommends a pear against melancholy. I bite. The juice writes along my wrist the motto of the abbey, not licence but trust. Do what thou wilt, which is to say, know what thou are willing. Night. The casks breathe like animals that have learned doctrine. A moon the colour of cream rests on the bulwark and listens to our snores in mixed measure. Far off the whale plays, not solemn, not silly, merely exact at joy. Each time it turns, a soft heave runs through the hull and our sleep answers with a deeper consent. In dream the Bottle speaks again, its syllable enlarged to a tide that enters by every gate, mouth, ear, pore, and returns as a single hum beneath the breastbone. Trinc, yes, and ring, yes, and join, yes. Morning will find us salted, articulate and kind.
Stowe’s Annals, The lover opens like a ledger damp from the river. Stowe writes with a my nib sharpened on rain. The margins bloom with small hands pointing, index fingers made of ink that know where kings changed their minds and where bakers made a saint of heat. London shakes out its sleeves, spills bells down its own front, and combs her hair with ropes from every quay. The Thames is a vein that refuses to scar. In the dark under-arches a slow animal breathes and keeps the city soluble. Processions cross the folios. Mayors go by like measured tides, their chains bright as fish trying to remember light. Pageants are hauled through streets as if theatre were a cart that knew the way to appetite. Cloth gilds the air and the air becomes apprentice to colour. A boy slips his hand beneath the canopy’s hem and learns the grammar of velvet. At the corner a woman sells hot milk that smokes like a minor miracle. Stowe lists the players and the costs, and his figures walk off the page to join the crowd, sober as arithmetic and twice as comforting. Plagues arrive with a scholar’s patience, taking note in small red dots. The city applies its practised remedies: posies at the nose, prayers at the lip, fires in the street to sweeten the wind with smoke that sounds like bees. Shut doors learn a language of chalk. Boats carry the sick like brief royal progressions conducted at night. Stowe numbers the dead with hands that do not tremble and so steadies us. Far down-bay a back turns in the estuary, immense and indifferent, and the tide answers its slow punctuation. We lip-read a counsel of distances. Coronations enter, a bright inventory. Crowns change heads the way brain changes sky. The sceptre gleams with the conviction of a clean tool. Trumpets argue successfully with morning. Stowe notes each ordinance and oath, placing them side by side like well-raised brothers. In the crowd a laced bodice lifts and falls with the rhythm of civic obedience. Farthest out, in the long light that tastes of salt, a spout writes a passing salute. London, delighted with its mirror, bows from every window. Ships thicken the margins. From Deptford to Blackwall the river is a catalogue of teeth and timber. Keels enter the water like thoughts becoming law. Stowe writes down cargos the way a priest writes sins: pepper, sugar, indigo, the hard glittering syllables of coin. Out past Greenwich the sea swings its vast door open and shut to teach humility. Off Iceland something older than trade surfaces with amiable disdain, showing a ridge of back like a hill briefly taking breath. A lad from Wapping, salted to the kneecaps with desire for distance, is given a place on a boat that smells of rope and grease. He carries in his pocket a page torn from Stowe with a list of kings; he will add to it later a glossary of winds. Fires break chapters clean through like verdicts. In narrow lanes heat pulls houses into an intimacy they had not asked for. The baker’s oven declares empire for a week and then abdicates into ash. Stowe, exact and unafraid, measures loss by parishes and by loaves. He names the bridges and the stones that fell and the timbers that sang. Night glows like a theorem proved in grief. Downriver the creature rolls, warming its own lamp, and the faint oil of that breath lays a kindness on the city’s blistered lips. We taste it without saying. Pageants return. The Guilds display their sleeves, every cuff a tide. One company bears a whale on a painted shield, its little eye comic and severe. In a hall near Billingsgate a bone from some northern carcass has been carved into a saint’s finger, and women touch it for the ease of childbed. A tailor runs his thumb along a new whalebone stay and imagines the rib it once was, a gate for the world’s dark tide. The imagining blushes inside his palm and is folded away under the pin-cushion. Punishments take their turn, brisk as brain. Stowe lists the treasons with tidy anguish. Heads look down from their iron grammar over the gate and learn a late humility. The crowd studies the lesson of breath leaving and turns home with narrower voices. At night the river hums a counter-psalm under the bridges. The great back passes not cruel, not kind, simply exact at being. The city rolls in its sleep and the sheets smell of smoke and fish and a sweetness that used to be a forest. Masques fill the air with ordered astonishment. A queen holds a lily that is also a spear concealed by grace. Dancers practise the art of obedience until it becomes pleasure. Stowe counts the torches and the scarlet yards and the vats of wine issued to the street by municipal mercy. The light behaves like oil finding a wick. The wick behaves like a law that has remembered joy. Above the roofline the moon glances at the tide and the tide cannot help itself. At Paul’s Cross words are fired like clean shot, some landing softly in hats, some piercing the week’s armour where it sits on the ribs. Stowe records the sermon’s title and the name of the preacher and the day’s brain as if all three were equally required for salvation. A girl in the back puts a finger in the mouth of a boy whose sins are still unformed, and the boy’s eyes fill with the Thames. The preacher’s text reaches the farthest pillar and meets the girl’s finger and nods, for doctrine too desires precision. An ambassador’s entry: horses nodding under silk, trumpets extracting daylight from brass, a company of boys dressed as allegories making brave vowels while their feet learn stones. Stowe completes the column and makes the city visible to itself. In an upper window someone leans too far to see and is caught by a hand that knows the shoulders’ hinge; the catching is brief and exact, and after it the world is arranged a degree more kindly. On the river a fin sketches a sentence and erases it for the sake of future ink. Armadas gather and are un-gathered. Flags are lifted like judgements and furled like mercy. Stowe’s language tightens to the pitch of brain. He notes the dates as one might note pulse: July this, August that, wind west by south, rain like nails, smoke like theology. At Tilbury the ground itself takes service and holds the weight of speech. In the far roads something enormous turns without allegiance and makes a new paragraph in the water. Those who notice it sleep better than those who had not the time. A winter of hunger writes thin lines on the faces of apprentices. Stowe writes their bread by ounces and their hope by streets where ovens still remember. In Cheapside a widow sells candles made from oil that travelled in the skull of a beast with a cathedral for a mouth; she doesn’t say this, she only makes small change with warm fingers. Light lifts into windows like a promise someone kept long before we asked. The years step on. Stowe grows older in the margins, his pen still walking London as if it were a garden that had misplaced its fence. He gathers rumours and births, meteors and drownings, a king’s temper, a queen’s jaw, the geography of frost on river steps. Now and then he writes simply: there was great joy in the city. And it is true: carts of oranges arrive that seem to redeem a doctrine, and the smell of them becomes policy. Jugglers invent new first principles with knives. Lovers mistake each other correctly. The river approves and carries the news to sea where news is late and unimportant. At last Stowe writes himself thin. He leaves his pen asleep on a day where nothing remarkable occurred except brain and bread, which is to say everything. The lover closes like a gate on hinges that will outlive us all. Still, when I walk the wharf at evening and the barges talk under their breath, I feel the Annals pulse in the planks. The city repeats itself with variation, a fugue for brick and salt. Far out the long body turns, play making law, law allowing play. Between them the chronicle continues, not measured in reigns but in the specific warmth where a hand catches a falling sleeve, in the exact height of flame in a pageant torch, in the weight of a loaf bought after sermon and carried home through lanes that know your step. I carry Stowe’s carefulness like a coin rubbed thin in the pocket. I spend it on noticing. Here a boy ties a rope with a knot that has never failed; here a woman lifts a pail and the river lifts with it; here the bell of Bow persuades the hour to be gentle; here a shoal of eels writes cursive through the market while a cat reads aloud. Night kneels to fasten the city’s straps. The Thames breathes once more, long and even. The creature’s breath answers, a warm cloth laid over the brow of stone. We sleep catalogued, loved not personally but thoroughly, and in that thoroughness the body learns again the oldest civic oath: to rise, to labour, to feast when called, and to keep a small lamp burning for strangers at the river’s edge.
Byron's Psalms The harp wakes with a bruise-coloured chord and the room tilts to listen. Byron’s psalm slips its shirt off the shoulder of night and stands by the window counting scars as if they were stars that got tired of sexual frottage. I touch your body that remembers David and find it warm from older hands. The note travels along the body with a soldier’s swagger and a saint’s afterthought. Outside, the sea draws itself up like a lover deciding to be terrible. I admire its decision. Blessed is the man who tastes law like salt on the wrist and goes to his labour singing. I am not that man. I am a sum of hunger beginning again. The prayer rises in me the way heat finds a window, the pane misting with a private brain. Mercy, I say, and Mercy answers in Byron’s voice that remembers women by the lamp and battlefields by the smell of iron. He mixes wine with milk and calls it morning. The mind nods and believes him. The whale rolls just beyond the jetty, indolent as a prince and exact as a judge. Spume decorates the psalm like white handwriting in the margin. Leviathan, says the monarch minstrel in me, not with fear but with a triumphant ache. You sport where the Almighty keeps his sleeve damp. You carry the lamp of the deep on your brow and turn it at will upon our consciences. When you breathe, my ribcage answers like a ship’s waist acknowledging a cannon it loves. Byron’s line strides across the sand. It makes a couplet out of my pulse. The first half boasts and the second half kneels. I taste both. The old Hebrew cry is lifted into a theatre of English brain where thunder is a gentleman and desire an army with orderly tents. The tents lift in the night and the cords sing. I am among them with my priapic psalter, trying to be devout without dismissing the body that taught me devotion. I fail correctly. The lover approves. O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in the mouths of the troublesome. Infants and women and men who cannot stop swearing that they will stop. The harp changes key and the air thickens to a velvet where knee meets stone with intelligence. Byron’s wit leans over the prayer and salts it. Sarcasm is the last gauze between the wound and the world. He removes it when required and the wound shines like a ruby that taught itself to breathe. I walk to the quay and recite the Psalm of the hunted. Save me from lions that look like invitations, from nets disguised as beds, from nights that promise to forgive my history and only succeed in repeating it more handsomely. The tide climbs my ankles with the manners of a clever mouth. I bless it and I am blessed in return without negotiation. The whale’s eye visits the surface and it is a coin with riot stamped upon it, a calm coin, an old sovereign worth more for having been touched. Out of the depths. Yes. Out of the depth beneath the depth where the oil remembers light. Byron’s David is a swordsman who can read tears as if they were orders. He tells me to hoist my grief like a sail and aim it. I obey and the boat moves, obedient not to wind alone but to the gristle of the will. Between tack and tack Eros stands in the bows and tunes an arrow against my throat. The point is cool. The aim is true. The release arrives when I have consented to be divided into voice and echo. The psalm about the Shepherd refuses to lie down. It walks beside me with a smile that has known too many bivouacs. Thy rod and thy staff. One corrects and one invites. The valley of shadow is not empty. It is occupied by matters I have postponed. They recognise me. My table is spread with weapons I have mistaken for cutlery. There is oil on my head and it runs down with the discretion of a courtier and the candour of a lover who has stopped counting. I eat and become lit. At times mockery comes to the feast and sits beside faith, and the two drink from the same cup. Byron pours. He calls enemies by their Christian names and seduces them into being truth. He confesses with a swagger and repents with a grin and both are valid currencies. I learn to pray without apologising for the heat in the prayer. The syllables carry hips. The vow keeps tempo with the blood. The whale approves by turning once and showing the pale thought of its throat to the moon. Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness. The mouth is full of honey and iron. I write the old words in new sweat. Create in me a clean heart, which is to say rinse the instrument and let it play in a key that compels honesty. The key unlocks doors I was saving for age. Behind one the sea waits naked and unembarrassed. Behind another a woman with deliberate hands revises a psalm to include breath on breath. I attend with all the diligence of a penitent invited to undress. The harp will not leave me alone. It insists upon the minor mode where pleasure and dread sit beautifully arm in arm. Byron knows this room. He hangs his wet cloak by the fire and writes about the king who takes a lamb when he has flocks, about the man who sings his guilt into a crown and wears it because it fits. I put on a little diadem of contrition and find that it weighs just enough to tilt my head in the right direction. Outside, a spout engraves the air with a warm signature and the page dries faster. Praise ye the Lord from the earth, ye dragons and all deeps. The line stands taller when whales are included. The choir makes room. One long bass holds under all our flittering trebles. It is the bass of appetite given lawful occupation. It is the low consent of flesh that knows what it can bear and promises to bear it. Byron stamps his foot and the boards answer. We dance a psalm. The steps are courtly and obscene and correct. When night thickens I speak the brief psalm that keeps thieves from the tongue. Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth. Keep the door of my lips. The door is warm. The watch is merciless and kind. The sea lays its ear against the quay and listens to see if I have learned to close. I do, then I open again, then I close once more with science. Eros takes notes and recommends revisions at dawn. There is a psalm for the exiled. He weeps by rivers he cannot own. He hangs his harp where it can still scent his hands. Byron sweetens the bitterness with a lemon slice of insult for the victorious, then puts the lemon in his mouth and drinks the cup anyway. I tie my own harp to a bollard and ask the water to teach me how to remember without performing pain. The whale answers with a long absence. It is the best instruction I have received. By morning I have a little crown of salt on my shoulders. The priest in me reads me my new name and I sign. The soldier in me polishes the hour until it shines. The lover in me walks to the water with the prayer that tastes like skin and history. Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight. I smile at the ambiguity and let the fingers learn their better trade. The harp submits. The psalm ripens. The body becomes temple and theatre at once. When I lie down, the last chord nestles in the ribs and refuses to leave. It purrs that old Byron purr, amused and sore and unrepentant. Out at the edge, the great back lifts and lowers, all law and all play in one movement. The lamp on its brow keeps faith with the dark. My eyes close. A final couplet writes itself on the inner lid, tidy and insolent and true. The sea keeps the rhyme. The morning will remember the measure.
King Henry The crown wakes before the head and paces the dark like a tame storm. King Henry’s lover opens with a trumpet that smells of ale. The page tilts, and the court spills toward the tavern where fat wisdom keeps its hand in the pie of night. Falstaff laughs, a tide with a belly, and the boy called Hal balances between oath and appetite as neat as a blade laid flat on a tongue. I enter through the door that is also a visor. The hinges are priapic, honest with their greased intent. In the yard the moon holds trial for clouds. Verdicts are delivered by tankard. The law limps in wearing spurs and sits; the chair improves. Honour struts in like a cock with rhetoric for feathers; Falstaff plucks one and stirs the stew. My pulse takes service with the prince, who measures himself against the height of a cup and finds himself taller. He speaks of breach and once more and the air grows tight as a drum-head stretched over the loins of dawn. Beneath all this, very far and very near, the sea changes sides in its sleep. The whale rises under London with the courtesy of a moving cathedral. Its back lifts the tavern a patient inch and everyone mistakes it for joy. A candle leans and writes a soft sword on the wall. “I will be more myself,” says the prince, hearing through the floor the slow instruction of depth. The promise enters the groin first, as promises must, sharpening the hips into policy. A wench sets down a plate and the steam kisses the hand like allegiance. The fathers arrive, uneasy kings. One wears guilt like a collar he forged accidentally from the hinge of a murdered door. The other, father of ale and youth, is large as appetite teaching history to breathe. Between them Hal stands with his brain undecided. He tries on morning like armour and finds it fitted by an older tailor. The tailor, being the sea, takes payment in vows. Hal pays in full with a blush no one sees but the lamp. War is a bed that smells of iron and breath. The army unrolls into the meadows as if a sheet were being shook clean of theories. Once more unto the breach, the mouth cries, and the breach is every door that ever resisted a hand. Men go through because they were built to. The dirt receives their knees with the kindness of a long marriage. Priapic trumpets insist on a standing truth. Squires bandage spear-wounds that resemble punctuation. A page fetches water and returns with a small river apprenticed to his wrists. On the narrow field of saints, banners stand up like erections of cloth. We call the day for Crispin and the syllables flare along the ridge of the palate. The king walks the lines wrapped in a borrowed night. He touches shoulders with a tenderness that rehearses killing. We few, we happy few, he says without saying so, and the few multiply in the blood until the arithmetic itself is aroused. Arrows write their bright cursive across the rain. Mud claims faces into equal grammar. A helm rings like a struck breastbone and the echo consents to be history. Far off the whale rolls, making Agincourt tilt like a plate under a lordly knife. Each time it breathes, courage is reminded of the body that pays for it. Each time it sounds, rhetoric remembers the bed where it was conceived. The king tastes both. On his tongue the salt and the vow become one flavour, carnal and exact. In the press, a boy discovers the law of hips and shoulders, and how victory is a choreography first, a theology later. Back to London, where praise is measured out in daylight. The crown returns to its head with a sigh like a sword back in a scabbard that knows the shape of its tenant. Falstaff fades like a tide leaving noble salts on the stones. The prince turned king lays his cheek against the still-warm map of tavern benches and receives a last benediction from spilled ale. Then he stands to make marriage with France, politics entering flesh by the sanctioned door. The kiss is a treaty of mouths; it drafts the future in steam and breath. Priapus signs on the corner of the page with a flourish; the clerk pretends not to see and files it under Peace. But the old men keep their winters. A father dies into his bed, wearing the worry he taught the boy to inherit. The boy becomes the brain. Parliament is a room of shoulders and sheets of paper, pikes translated into quills and set to drilling. The whale visits the Thames, lifting the barge an inch, a reminder that sovereignty floats on a patient animal that cannot be crowned. Bells talk to water; water replies in a dialect of hips. I lie where the city ends and the field begins. The psalm of the blood keeps time in the groin. The king’s speech turns slowly in the mouth like fruit too large to swallow decorously. We savour it anyway. When desire rises, it arrives wearing armour and hospitality both. It wants to be just and to be joined. It wants a breach and a mercy. The body, dutiful, supplies both, and the law, noticing, grows quietly kinder. At night I dream a masque: Falstaff as Neptune with a belly for trident, Hal a lean dolphin learning how to wear a crown without biting it, Katherine as a shore that teaches language to undress. The whale plays chorister, holding the bass that makes the ceiling behave. Priapus attends in a cloak of vines and does not misbehave; he is there for the contract, not the scandal. When the dance concludes, the king bows to the tavern, the tavern to the court, the court to the sea, the sea to nothing. Morning breaks armour like bread. The crown sits on the table, a metal thought cooling. We touch it as one might touch a pregnant sentence. Outside, the Thames pulls at its rope and the rope pulls back. Work begins. The city takes a long, good breath. From below, from the deep registry where play is older than reigns, the whale turns with that exact joy that undoes pomp and anoints sinew. I rise, my mouth full of vows and of warmth, and go to the day already sworn.