Kundalini Splendor

Visitation

When I heard he had entered the harbor,

and circled the wharf for days,

I expected the worst: shallow water,

confusion, some accident to bring

the young humpback to grief.

Don't they depend on a compass

lodged in the salt-flooded folds

of the brain, some delicate

musical mechanism to navigate

their true course? How many ways,

in our century's late iron hours,

might we have led him to disaster?

That, in those days, was how

I'd come to see the world:

dark upon dark, any sense

of spirit an embattled flame

sparked against wind-driven rain

till pain snuffed it out. I thought,

This is what experience gives us ,

and I moved carefully through my life

while I waited. . . Enough,

it wasn't that way at all. The whale

—exuberant, proud maybe, playful,

like the early music of Beethoven—

cruised the footings for smelts

clustered near the pylons

in mercury flocks. He

(do I have the gender right?)

would negotiate the rusty hulls

of the Portuguese fishing boats

— Holy Infant, Little Marie —

with what could only be read

as pleasure, coming close

then diving, trailing on the surface

big spreading circles

until he'd breach, thrilling us

with the release of pressured breath,

and the bulk of his sleek young head

— a wet black leather sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice —

and his elegant and unlikely mouth,

and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,

and the way his broad flippers

resembled a pair of clownish gloves

or puppet hands, looming greenish white

beneath the bay's clouded sheen.

When he had consumed his pleasure

of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,

in his own admired performance,

he swam out the harbor mouth,

into the Atlantic. And though grief

has seemed to me itself a dim,

salt suspension in which I've moved,

blind thing, day by day,

through the wreckage, barely aware

of what I stumbled toward, even I

couldn't help but look

at the way this immense figure

graces the dark medium,

and shines so: heaviness

which is no burden to itself.

What did you think, that joy

was some slight thing?

~ Mark Doty ~

Mark Doty is one one of the most brilliant poets of our time. Once he experienced a deep mystical experience during an acupuncture treatment, but he opted for the life of the artist--which embraces both the light and shadow, and includes the ordinary as well as transcendent experience (though some mystics do both as well). Mainly, I think that Doty did not want to explore the celestial realms or acknowledge the divine as a legitimate reality. But what he has done in his poetry to reveal the luminous truth of encountered experience through his language is stunning. The frolicking whale is an impressive interpretation of the capacity of nature itself to remind us that darkness is not the whole story, and that the creatures of earth and ocean can play in ecstasy even when things seem bleak to us.

(photo from Google)