The Whale Card by Chrystos

[hypdaydream.livejournal.com]

The Whale Card

you send after two raw years of deepest silence
begins by saying I’m probably furious with you
for not writing or speaking
Late with assumptions
which flap our old air gasping
Angry for so long after you packed your clean/
laundry / my work into matching luggage
& left our 8 years in 1 day
My rage a reason for you to escape
These words return say you’re not good at writing
become stubborn when pressured
bursting from whales who possibly sing
or flee ambiguous as what you want from me
now
My anger beached itself in Oregon useless dead pain
bared teeth these whales suck prey through
I could write you a steamy plume of why
Trained at Marine World to rise to your bait
believed I was retired from grief you left
me swimming through
useless as the word always to mean love
you said so often or is it that you
think of me sometimes even fondly
as though singing were a new language
& the net of tricks we named love
has caught you unaware turning in circles
for red herring your nose against my fragile glass
wall house where you’ve never been
Never is another useless word which screams
Maybe whales have no purpose except as food for dogs
My new lover says whales have something
important to tell us
judging by your card of 2 whales possibly cavorting /
fighting for their lives / taking baths / spouting poetry /
glaring at the inevitability of your card /
which you thought I might like / it is true
This is a painter I admired when you & I were lovers /
pain / before I preferred my own colors
You tell me about your job with computers
Life here is fine
I consider writing you an unsigned postcard saying
Define fine
Soon you’ll be on vacation in the same place where
I’ll go to a workshop with my typewriter /
pain / but I’ll still swim
You’ll be with Lesbian wife & child
your loving patriarchal love song
untouched by the harpoon of feminism
You end with the words, Say hi to J
She hates you as you’ve felt
not simply as the woman I couldn’t give up
or as former lover logged in photo albums
she hates you / for / me
how could I /
pain / hate you despite this long stabbing separation
when there were not enough fish for us both
After you walked out /
pain / scenes  between us were common as herring
red battles waged in the teeth of embarrassed friends
angry new lovers / stunned passersby
You sign yourself    love
I amend my postcard: Define love
Even fondly I don’t understand the songs
of whales or you
A card with such a boring faded print would be burned
if written by anyone else
I crumple & smooth & recrumple my fingers touch
your writing as though I could feel your heart
You still insist on breaking the water of my need
Finally abandoning obsession only
to find I’m frequently given
what I’ve so desperately wanted
when I can no longer swim in it
I wanted you
in some capacity: memory / floodlight / whale
teeth to slip through / family
I gave you up / tired of waiting for you to go away
Get off this beach
You’re dead gray fish in my mailbox
Your words rip / Nostalgia is a disease which smells
a quiet killer                       I can’t do tricks
must have open sea                          Why
did you write
why did you leave
don’t say you care / pain / no more herring for you
I’m not furious
You’re no longer the keeper of my feelings
Or I’m more furious than a letter could hold
Stubbornly I won’t tell you I’m fine
because I’m still not & perhaps will not
ever heal from your amputation of love that word
like prey / which circles me a flyer about whale watching
from a boat with no return address / I’m fighting
for my life I’m not good at writing any
of this / you won’t see it until the phantom
pain in my arms is silent
My darling I am not furious I wept with joy
to see your writing          which I’ll never admit
Went down to the water to remember how
we were one motion in such tender light
Wept with a gash in my throat
where I’m too stubborn to recover from your teeth
The whale you were lives on in my body
I feed her when no one is looking
though it is clear / pain / we cannot
fit each other ever again
& I admit I have nothing I can say to you
that would not beach itself to die
This silence
as great as a sea in which we both have drowned
what I sang to you
useless
with no place to go.


- Chrystos (from the collection 'Fire Power')

Comments

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Powerful; thank you for posting this.

[iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com]

oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.