Earhart, Fishercat dreams, and the Frequency of the queer at Sea

A three poem Saturday

Line of Position

We are running on a line
living into the skies 
at the leave of our instruments, 
a dead reckoning rising 
from the chromatic
at the coda of speed and steel.

Gas running low, unable to reach you

Electra's song sings under the static
against the scraping tide where shells are emptied, torn
her wings churn back to ore--
identification in the debris field is a matter of scale.

We must be on you but we cannot see you.
As night clusters our flight path
we grope for a morning. A large ring
of white sand around a bright lagoon.

This is Emil Harte

We lay out the bones of frigate birds, a testament 
on sand. In our dreams Electra still offers shelter on the reef,
we lean into the transmitter, spit into sunspot
and whisper our prayer for coordinates onto the harmonic.
Give us a bearing-- what is our position now?

I am an island where lost flyers make landfall.

Here, fingertips trail through the mercurial haze
on the glass, lending letters to the morning.

Here,  post-loss transmissions 
still crackle the airspace between
sense and instrument,
even as the promises
of a world no longer a future
are carried over in the pincers of crabs.

We are listening.

Italicized bits are from the final transmissions of Amelia Earhart picked up by various monitors after she was reported as lost.

Eahart sometimes submitted poems to Poetry magazine
under the name Emil Harte.

52 Hertz

By fathomed sound we count you round
five thousand knots a year
across trench and rift and otolith
We press our windwhipped ear

down upon womb wall,
and fashion what we hear—
souls charcoaled on bulla bone,
unmanned minds drawn near.

At every checkpoint monitored
from every spec of sphere,
unanswered cries come in from out.
The world's a rumbling smear

of songs of lonely firsting-fire
and square-pegged bursts of queer
tolling under dark sea face,
each scrawling rawl a flare

appearing in the lower skies
to mark each mutineer
or call some flagging will to form,
some leaper to the shear.

Each sounding in the after-word
begs us for a name
that calls each spark from out the shards
to sing upon the plain

songs of lonely firsting fire
and square pegged burst of queer,
soundings all along the wall—
we, the blessed, are here.

A lone cetacean, believed to be either a Blue or a Fin Whale, has been tracked and recorded in the Pacific since 1989. A being heard but never seen, this whale sings at a frequency outside the expected range of any the known species. It was, until recently, assumed to be alone and unaswered.

Under Bite

After breakfast, she slipped outside,
closed her eyes and, arms spread into the sky
became a windmill.
But the North Wind was still at home
over the hills, sleeping
so the air could not turn 
the great gears of her middle.

By noon, eyes shut
she hunched her back
and became a snow white
porcupine, spiring her dreams sharp.
But the other children would not pay 
her any mind, so there was no one
come close enough in which to sink quills..

Finally, come sundown
she saw herself a sleek fisher
gnawing (not the bones
of ducklings) but the ropes
that bound the giant
who would swing the hammer
that would set loose the word gone stone.

---

—-For a short while I had a makeshift father, a prison abolitionist and poet-pirate Yid who would speak certain phrases and verses to me in a daily litany, punctuating the many longer stories that poured out from him at the end of his life. He spoke less of cardinal directions than the way to travel. One such way he marked on me, which I have mentioned before, was his transposing of Yevteshenko.

You cannot leap halfway across the abyss.

This season’s talk of ashes and dust brought him close in. Ash is such a multivalent element. I am making some here now in this fire that is burning off the chill of this leaky farmhouse in the foothills of the Whites. More than enough each winter day to write a thousand oaths on skin but so many sentences this year have been unfinished, left unsaid in a way that is maybe less silence before mystery, less lament than simply hanging back.

The story behind Lent is, I guess, that there is more to do than just the salvaging, this straining the stories for hope of love and siddur in the wilderness we are doing between us. There are pearls that were are father’s eyes to be loosened from the seabed and brought up, loosed and made new. But there are also things antithetical to bread/wine/body/blood that must be dug out from our own eyes and let go. I think one such splinter, at least in me, may be the idea that mystery demands we never fully embrace a particular One.

Jack Barron recently recommended to me the observation of the Japanese actor Yoshi Oida: Europeans will dig a bit and if they don't find what they're looking for, they will start digging in another place, and then another while the Japanese will dig one hole and keep digging and digging in the same spot. Both will find it eventually.

To borrow the strange, for Lent (a phrase I am sure I have never said) I am going to surrender the halfway and ( forgive me, Yevgeny) the otherside of the abyss as well. Further down and further in it will have to be. I have been stuck on an attempt along these lines for a fair few weeks but I finally realized I just had to turn myself upside down to match the place I was born into. I don’t know whether it will be useful to anyone besides myself but I will post it in a couple days and will be glad to hear any manner of responses, knives or spoons.

*Sorry for the lack of audio. Some internet troubles here have made the recordings very patchy.