by
Milton Acorn
The dolphin knight, elected king for a day
Or ace, jack, joker, humble and/or mysterious blank
Or wild deuce - wherever he's settled in the shuffle
Or throw of dice . . . Analogy doesn't suffice
To portray just one part of the game in which
the fine stroke of play
Is the appointed one's discovery of what he really is
because he really wants ...
(the ocean's hung with and crossed by schools as a sky is
with clouds,
individual fish breaking off like rain
though what we'd call a sky is definite as if honed -
indeed the sky, our kind of sky's in the downward direction
always a night, a pit in which dim stars wander ...
but darkness is not the same to a dolphin
as it is to a sighted man, perhaps more like a blind man's ...
he calls, continuously and repeatedly, something,
maybe his name
and everything in range calls its name back at him)
And the dolphin does, or some thing does, or something
will do
Not only discover maps with his voice, but construct them:
It is like a paradise with many kinds of chess castles
Plus other things more marvelous (we can't yet imagine) ...
It is a world, a play with himself the entire cast
The dolphin knight, elected for this, throws out
for his entire clan
To move through, questioning, arguing in gracious Spanish,
crying defiance like opera singers . . .
(how do you bring the women in, describing like this?
is a dolphin male a man? A female a woman?
Functions are functions, but outside of that
You might as well call them a third and fourth sex of Man ...
Unless we too, overlaid by our functions
have in disguise many sexes - apparent now only
as perversions
(and where's the perversion? in the person
or in things static and moving, constructions of Humanity?)
The world is full of cries and echoes, ours no less
than the Dolphins :
Our hands know the world, can hardly know without
changing it
(A matter of degree, but the degree's large, qualitative)
Would not one who changed less finally - dare more?
It's a matter of becoming accustomed to change
And changing as we wish, not in the darks of wishless engines;
Who, creatures of perverted wishes - often perverted
wishes
Give rise in turn to more perverted wishes
Til the balls manipulate the juggler, the engine
cuts off the human head;
Sets it on itself to operate without human juices ...
Altho
This is actually an analogy:
The body simply fades, becomes of little account
And the head of the machine man, in turn
Is reproduced in countless duplicates
To set, complete with thoughts, upon the necks
of his countless slaves.
But isn't this a matter of degree? You and I
Don't our brains - their parts wave like seaweed -
sparkle with energy
In conversation, work, play, all deeds of ecstacy?
And are not matter and energy the same?
Does not your word gathered in the energies of your brain
Make a little shift to become your voice
Another little one to become what I hear, to become
what whirls in my brain
And what I answer - isn't that part of yourself thrown
back at you
Out of part of yourself? Are not we two one?
Ourselves an analogy for Humanity?
The Dolphin knight, elected king for a day
Or for whatever role in which he is still king
Lives whole lives, entire lifetimes
In a world that's all his til the next celebration
When he comes into another's world, knows the whole
content of another's life :
Thus all are one because each one is one
As a strangeness but not a stranger; not as a Human
stuck up like a bowling pin.
If we could be that, so of each other, for each other;
Willing to let another's thoughts be blood
And drip into our nerves as into veins
Would there be any end to us, in space or time?
27/6/71