The Sound of Whales

The pressure of the deep distorts the solitary quester,
elongates fragile skeletons
upon which the spirit flutters
down in the primary darkness
where inches are measured, like British wealth,
in the thousands of heavy pounds
that no human ear membrane,
diaphanous as translucent silk,
could support the push of.

There he comes alone,
far from the thick percolating soup of light and the
miniscule ocean mines of photo and zooplankton,
questing for the sustenance of bull whale,
of brave sperm whale---
massive thoothed, frame of passion,
hold of belly-fired entrails
and solitary, solitary mind---
questing for the sustenance that can be found
only in the hours-long soundings of the huge, vasty
and mind-blinding deep.

Kingdoms of ferocious looking wide jawed minnow fish,
gape eyed blackfish, all belly and mouth fish,
blink their eyes like beacons and schools of dappled
wierlight spin through the eternal cold night
like Lucifer's own stars;
there are the secrets of the soul encountered!
Down where the squid grow mammoth to behold,
down where mystery pervades all things,
so far down, that anything can become primal grist.

Where little food filters through the living
ocean net of saltblooded feeders far below
the halls of streamered light,
into the cathedrals of the night, he comes,
here the old bull spermwhale dives for combat with the squid,
and more than this, floats massive in the ink of
breathless ecstasies,
down where lantern fish bio-luminesce
in schools for the souls of whales.

Eyes of whale peer from his immobile tons,
ears listen to the sounds of heartbeat,
body warmed by flesh straining on the edge of self
consuming primal fires.

Three thousand feed down, below the day,
with lungs compressed, stove-in like cartons,
he feeds a mind
that partly counts the atoms of oxygen
screaming in his blood,
partly sniffs with his skin at the smell of the rapturous,
almost unbearable pressure,
but mostly, lost in the endless reaches of the divine,
observes the oracular movements
of bioluminescent minnows.

Angler baits glow the way to finy coffin-mouthed bodies,
lights that deter the hungry,
blinking bright beams of yellow haze,
glimmers of meaning that dance like searchlights
from the very eyes of the gossamer
angelic demons of the whale's soundings.

What dark mysteries do they perform,
before those full, round, sad and sentient eyes?
Mind without hands that soon must rise,
moving to the glassy seatop heights,
up from inverted mountains of the sea-deep descent,
up to the chambers of the whale tribe.

Old solitary bull,
even he must come to the surface to breathe
and to roll in the heat,
moving up through rooms shaped by cold and warm currents,
by detrees of density, and shades of light,
first blue and then higher into millions of pulsing,
wave dancing beams of green and white,
that ride down at angles into the liquid organism
inhabited by you, leviatian,
living pipes of a divine and strange organ of being.

What do you bring up with you, form the treasuries of
Neptune's fairy nymphs?  What insights
and rarefied understandings?  What nourishment?
What illuminated passions of the tormented
and ecstatic
souls of whales?