Sea Swoon

Reading these words, first time: First sentence raises hairs on my arms; visceral SWOON. The very word ‘swoon’ saturates me, attendant sensorial pulses mambo dipping me. Waves slide over me, catching me in palpable push-pull tides.  

Hairs up again—quivering: 5th paragraph; 3^rd sentence; begins:  

swoony as the sea . . .  

 

Follows a poem, by poet extraordinaire:  Diane Ackerman 

 

Whale Songs 

 

Speaking in storm language,

a humpback, before it blows

            lows a mournful ballad

in the salad-krill sea, murmurs

deep dirges; like a demiurge,

it booms from Erb to Santa Cruz,

bog low, its foghorn a thick liqueur.

 

Crepe black as a funeral procession,

the pod glides, mummer-deft,

through galloping brine,

each whale singing the same

runaway, rounded tune:

 

Dry finger rub, drag, drub

a taut balloon. Glottal stops. Pops.

dry fingers resume, then, ringing

skeletal chimes, they ping

and rhyme—villanelles, canticles,

even a Gregorian done on ton tongues

 

as trapped below the consciousness

of air, hungry, or wooing

or lamenting slaughter,

jazzy or appalled,

they beat against the wailing wall

of water, voices all

in the marzipany murk they swim,

invisible but for their sons.

 

And often they raise high

as angels’ eyes a refrain

swoony as the sea, question-mad,

sad, all interrogatives, as if

trying to fathom the fathomless

reach from ladle-shaped ocean,

scurrilous surf, to breach-birth

upon beach and blue algae’s cradle.

 

Sleek black troubadours

playing their own pipes, each body

a mouth organ, each shape a daguerreotype

of an oblate friar caroling,

they migrate, glad to chain rattle

and banshee moan, roaming the seas

like uneasy spirits, a song on their bones.