When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone by Galway Kinnell

Author:Galway Kinnell [Kinnell, Galway]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83158-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

WHO, ON EARTH

A ship sits on the sea raking

the water for fishes. A wave

flops heavily on top

of itself, defeat, and before

long does it again, defeat.

A skate, a baby, newly beached,

lies on the sand working her

sucking holes. Last night

I woke to a singing so high

it used only a soprano’s

last outer notes, sometimes

sliding up into ultra-alts—

music a whale straying

into the Aegean long ago

might have keened through the wood walls

of ships in the black hours,

luring, wrecking

the sailors. I followed

down dark corridors to a lighted

courtyard where a woman sat

up to her waist in a pool,

singing. She turned

and kept singing, as though

she saw someone through me

and sang to him. Her breasts

were small and shapely,

like an athlete’s, their

nipples never darkened

by the remorseless mouths

of babies. On the blurred

flesh under water black

dulse stirred—and down there too

was a sparkling, as of scales,

as if the submerged half of her

might be shutting itself up now

inside a fish tail—or, it could be,

pipping, busting, uncrumpling

a forked creature. On the beach,

pebbles, or maybe scales

shed on this spot at high tide

in some throe of metamorphosis,

gleam. In the skate

the mass of whatever

substance flesh on dying becomes

presses down into the sand,

trying to fall into the heaven

inside earth almost visible

through the half-washed windows

of stones. The sea

bristles up in waves. The largest

strikes the shore, gets upended,

leaps, lunges, crawls

all the way up to the skate,

then half sinking straight down,

half flowing back out, drags off

the carcass, leaving bubbles,

which pop, leaving the force

that crushes waves into nothing

to its victory. As when

mom harangues and pop icy-shoulders

the boy who can’t think, can’t yell,

explain himself, laugh, love, or sing;

can only fall in loneliness

with … but … who,

on earth?

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