If only families could make their way
through the ether that separates
the ever-existent from the dead-and-gone,
he would have brought his family with him.
But families of the famous leave nothing
visible behind them, thus are denied
future lives. Even in death life was unfair.
Melville had known the loneliness of the sea,
months of men enduring men, the terrible
singlemindedness that comes from long nights
in your cabin with a dream. He wanted no more
of it, but here in his blue Cape Cod, two blocks
from the lighthouse, it was just himself again,
finally well-known, and no one in whom
to confide the startling emptiness of success.
Evenings he thought he could hear sounds
of life from distant and disappearing shores.
Some mornings above the steel-gray sea
the light seemed purer than ever.
Must be the lucidity, he decided, that comes when sex
no longer distracts. Must be the journey’s end.
When journalists called, asking if he would permit
an interview, he’d say he preferred not to.
When asked why, he preferred not to say.
No one wanted to hear, he was sure of it-
that for every magnitude he felt an incompleteness,
for every Moby-Dick or Billy Budd he could see
thousands of words unwritten, falterings of courage.
“There goes Melville,” townspeople would say, proud
that a man whose books had been made into movies
walked among them. And he, who had called for
“The sane madness of vital truth,” would tip his Greek
sailor’s cap and smile. On this earth, he thought,
surely there must be some vista from which all of this
would make sense, surely some final gladdening.
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