Blubberer
“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Isaac Newton: Brewster, Memoirs of Newton (1855), vol II, Ch. 27
It’s eighteen fifty
something: Polar
North, out here,
there, only blue.
Hefting fish barrels,
sloshing crates of
bear livers, eugh.
Bored, the reds
of my eyes well up
nails splinter
like I dragged them
down the deck
hey-ho, work to be done.
Pearly sweat
licks my nape
bites as it freezes
frosting my fishstink.
From utterly
nowhere freights
of ice ghostship past,
creaking
under coldstar,
sharp hefts
that bear up
like teeth in the night
more things in heaven n earth,
Horror-ratios and that
I quiver on bandy wood
You may be suffering
From nematodes, raw
Acute Trichinosis
Watch now, how
the doctor’s tricky worm
clacks against his palette
luminous chunk of moonblubber
pay him no mind,
his version of a hard day’s work
is playing in guts.
The men are grown silent,
beds covered in hair,
skin peeled, we begin
to resemble our catch.
Rocktongued, tightened
and tasting our own iron,
as if we sail just North
of the world’s cold
dark throat.