All afternoon on Cabot Strait, the porpoises
Passed the city of the ferry in small pods,
Always swimming in the opposite direction.
A few people on the seventh-level deck,
Of ten, hung on the railings, spotting them.
Inside, hanging televisions, a dining room
Serving diner food, and clusters of berths
Bustled above the the clutches of metal
And polycarbonate machine eggs awaiting
Their owners, locked and silent in the hold.
Outside, around the boat and porpoises
And everything else the ocean held alive,
Mechanical, organic, coincidental, or dead,
The waves swelled relatively quietly, horizon
To horizon, nothing magical or menacing
About them, about anything, about nothing.
Then we docked in orderly fashion, left
The parking decks in orderly fashion
And proceeded on our various ways.
On the deck of a back room at a motel
That evening, one of us, me, who was legion,
Watched the pale gold, nacreous glow
Of sunset in the clouds above another sound
And read, in peace, "I had caught a glimpse
Around the blinders, and what I saw
Was the landless grey expanse of a northern
Sea, that emptiness of pewter ribbed
In wind and sun. There was no channel
Marker I could find, no shore to crawl up on."
Which was truer, the details or the vision?
There are at least six major traditions
Of thought in Indian philosophy that bear
On this question. In at least one, the facts
Are not only the illusion, they're the menace.
Where were those porpoises going, anyway?
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