Sink the Whale and Sleep All Day in the Real World, Up and Functioning More Fully Imagined and Dreamed, in Society's Than in Your Own, Imagination?

• The problems of Bartleby
• Twelve billion tons of ice melted in Greenland yesterday
• Reading, and mourning, *Moby Dick* on the cusp of climate catastrophe: Melville’s 200th birthday coincides with the human-made sixth extinction, as well as with the emptying, warming, and clogging up of the world’s oceans via overfishing and the dumping of plastics. Such facts imbue his novel with renewed and melancholy relevance. Reading his book about a sentient, majestic, and desperate-to-live marine mammal in a period when the planet’s whales — and all other creatures — are under such threat grants the work a grim ecological cast.
• And then there is Chapter 77, *The Great Heidelburgh Tun,* on decapitating the slaughtered whale to extract profit, what my copy opened to when I picked it up just now, and...
• Bleggalgaze

    

"HAVE MADE EARTH A MIRROR OF HEAVEN"

Alice Notley

my name is Alice Elizabeth, so am I

Allie Sheedy of the movie Short Circuits thus angry

or Elizabeth McGovern self-controlled?

This question is posited

on a television screen where I can't quite identify

the actress shown—which is she?

  

I am Allie and I will continue to rant.

__  __________________

  

My voice rises in real life often—

because I am 'passionate' ... that's

a convenient word.

___________________

  

I'm still in the forest, darkening

wishing I were 'nicer.'

  

Hardwood says, You should stand up soon

I'll help you

I say, I have cramps

I say, I'm using my period, to get pissed off and to Know.

____________________

  

I dreamed, last night, about an immense Dead Seal

below the surface of the water in a harbor

  

pull the curtain down.

For months you would not break the spell

for eternities you have not done so, citing economic

exigencies; the whole thing is a mess.

I might rather be dead

than doing what it takes to keep the seal under water

whale-sized

  

E is for seal. For spell. For suppression.

____________________

  

To take part in you is to die

is why one dies

Have I said this before? 

____________________

  

I am Alp the Dizzy.

____________________

  

The dead seal isn't a person, it's poetry the seal

the hallmark

of selfhood, dead grotesquely large and richly hardening.

  

"Hardwood it was someone like you

you drowned the seal"

  

"No I'm making both you and it 'hard.' "

____________________

  

And I'm still in the forest.

____________________

  

And I'm still in the forest

  

Money's more the real live poetry

abstract symbolic imaginary

trade your life for it and trade it for your life

so you'll have something 'to do'

  

Sink the whale

and sleep all day in the real world, up and functioning

more fully imagined and dreamed, in society's

than in your own, imagination?

  

I'm standing

I'm standing up Hard

I keep being Hardwood myself, dark and hard.

____________________

  

Initiating a new 'broken symmetry' (spinning to the

Left, like a newborn neutrino)

so that we can have a new consciousness ...

am I doing that? Yes I think so.

____________________

  

The forest contains a French restaurant

every meter or so ...

difficult to fast in this dream vision.

We're a very unpopular group today

We've shot off another great bomb

and we've shot down a terrorist,

an Arab, young, before

we even found out what he "knew."

____________________

  

Tell me something beautiful, bitter

because we are somehow bitter, forever,

a taste included in origin, in love, in you.

So I don't have to be cloyed.

  

... soul's waters are reticent

sly swamps.

                       It had nothing in it,

that swamp; because I didn't know how to look for

the parts of its obvious whole—death is

minute, flavorful parts—which are said to spin

as I'm said to walk, moving while else

mostly unconscious of that.

____________________

  

In the new consciousness