Between Self and Soul: A Voyage

By Barbara Groark (a poem from some time in the 1980s)

The Dream:

Through the pipe in his teeth, jaw thrust forward
Stubbs says, "We're going after Moby Dick."

I cling flat with both hands to the surfaced submarine,
black and adamantine,
through rough night seas. Waves break over,
but I stay. Behind me an old man in a white
suit and string tie with a little girl by the hand
walks on sea legs toward me through the wind.
I worry for their safety. The wind whips them over-
board. I say, "That doesn't happen."

I awake.

The Waking:
Several years later: Thar she blows. It's Moby Dick,
destroyer of men and boys.
All those boys at the bottom of the sea.
Thar she blows.

The captain's log,

But I am only the lookout.

Ahab is destroyed I hope. Who needs a mad captain?

Should women be in the navy and sail the seven seas?

Some may need to do hard things
their mothers didn't do for lack of knowledge
or courage or wherewithal or need.

Not every man would sail the seas.
Not every woman either. On the water, rocking
steady, boards creaking, the harpooneers watch the
water, the rowers wait, sometimes an hour. Sometimes
he gets away. All those boys at the bottom of the sea.
The captain now is Christ.

No danger of suicide
if we follow our leader.

No danger of suicide.
Moby Dick hates girls and grandfathers.
The girl is six or eight, the grandfather like Santa,
old enough to wobble, moves slowly enough
for a child’s pace. They are safe now behind a rail.
But the rest of us are with the boats and have the whale.
He's slippery and he is cruel.

A diabolic nature,

not human. His animal eyes look at you dully.

I'd been riding him, the whale, for several years.
Ahab beckoned from his back, a dead man beckoning.
I've been dead for several years now at the bottom of the sea.
I'm strange-looking, like those fish that never see the light.
There's no negotiating with him.

Safe, if you follow the leader.

There's no negotiating,
no reason in him.

Yet he has innocent prisoners.

Will they wash up whole on the shore, shaken but alive?
Will they scar like Ahab, marred, bitter, dangerous?
Will they be destroyed before we reach them?

Maybe we can only ease their deaths.
Our father will heal them. They will die to this world
and be with us in the next.

For some the next is now.

Unreason to combat unreason.
Unreason greater than their unreason.
Patience greater than their patience.
Strength greater than their seeming strength.

Patient as hell. Love with no room for fear.

That is what they most fear,
as you've noticed. It puzzles them, your confidence.