After the Roaring 'Forties
Waking at midnight: the sudden meanness of confronted clay.
No wind to flatten faces
against this skull—
faces the captain wears when he is not captain but each in turn his shallow crew.
Death is the matter where this storm has stilled a soothing passage for his residue of life.
Tell him he fails
to move for lack of conflict!
He does not wish to hail other ships passing or stealing home back to their mother ports, bellows no questions at the sky, nor begs news of white whale or black the sea for all he knows renews each day out of her ovaries; he does not ask of albatross or petrel his fodder's destinations, follows no tern to garden islands tilled by blue breakers.
Still grows his age cored with the stricken sun, tall, in the sea's clenched fist, sun, passage, water, all weaned of their questions.
NATHANIEL TARN
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