WHEN THE SONG LEFT THE SEA
KEVIN HULL
© 2011 Kevin Hull, All rights reserved
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0434-9
Other books include:
LEAVING BLUE MOUNTAINS Poetry
NAMELESS TRAVELER: (Memoir of an American Poet)
SLEEPERS IN TRANSLATION: Selected Poems
ECHOES THE MYSTERIUM: Novella
DREAMS FROM A FLOATING WORLD: CollectedPoems: 1982–2012
Kevin-Hull.com 520-850-3312
This, my first novel, is lovingly dedicated to the following: my late Mother and Father, my illustrious Teacher, ParamSant Thakar Singh Ji, my dear friend LaDan Hatami and, last but not least, Mary, whose tender support would never let me quit, even in the darkest of times.
A special thanks to Roshan, a brilliant young man from Nepal, for all his computer help and encouragement.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Gray whales occasionally hurl themselves out of the water and plunge back in with a tremendous splash! This is called a whale breach. Scientists do not know why Gray whales do this, but it is a very exciting sight to see!
From the Government Archives: great Gray Whales
God is supreme music; the nature of which is harmony.
Pythagoras
1
the mind wanders
in its grooves –
a flower blooms
In his dream he was walking along the shoreline, gazing out to sea with a peculiar feeling of prescience.
A pulse of great Gray whales was moving south and could be seen far out on the horizon. They would soon be in the warm waters of Mexico, where they would breed and birth before retracing their mammoth journey north to their feeding grounds in the Bering Sea.
He saw her from a distance, gathering shells. The vast ocean was washing its dead, wave after wave. Walking toward her, he too stopped occasionally, enticed by an attractive shard from the depths. Some of these he put in his pocket; others he tossed back upon the beach. The woman was looking out at the darkening sea; perhaps towards Okinawa or the mountains of China.
Perhaps she imagined nothing farther than the flashing crest of the angry waves. It was a wild sea, gray and foreboding, a storm building in the west and growing quickly, enveloping them with wind and driven pockets of rain. Time had accomplished nothing. It was the old story, always the same beginning, this feeling of self and no self, this unceasing hunger, this scar of existence.
“Beautiful weather, isn’t it?” he laughed, “If you like dark chaos, that is.”
She looked him in the face with an expression of curious detachment. He could have been a shadow sweeping across the sand. But as he remained silent and motionless, the simple question he had asked began to fill the air with unexpected significance. Her expression changed; a look almost of embarrassment, with flushed cheeks, revealed the thin and freckled creases of her face.
“Yes, it is,” she concurred and nodded politely, looking out to sea.
“You’re not from here?” he said, with certainty.
“O no!” she laughed softly. “How about you?” He shifted his feet in the sand, smiled, and bent down to capture a tiny sliver of a shell he saw spinning towards the sea. She noticed the quickness with which he moved.
“This, I suppose, is home base,” he said evasively. “I’ve been around here, on and off, for awhile.” He rose and turned to face her. “Where, then, if I may ask, are you from? I thought I detected a slight southern lilt in your voice.” And he handed her the piece of shell. It shone like liquid pearl, a purple and golden wash flowing with neither matrix nor design. She received it in silence.
“Yes, I have roots – I would say strangled roots – there.”
“So what brings you to this extremity?”
“Just seeing the country – what do you do here?” But she intended to say, “What are you doing here?”
“Just working to survive, like everyone. My sister and I run an antique shop – a complete flop, to be truthful. I’m becoming the number one antique. Maybe one day they’ll put a price tag on me.” He was angry at himself for this lame response. Using one’s age as a substitute for wit always left him cold, and here he was doing it himself, and doing it badly.
“But what would you do?” He looked at her long and hard. This was a question he’d rather not answer.
“To discover, I guess, what love means.” And the bitterness in his laugh startled her. But there was something else too in the timbre of his voice that upset her as well. He seemed to be insinuating that nothing was worth ‘becoming’ in this world. He had not been able to hide the long years of disappointment. “Be a poet, a writer,” he mumbled, after a pause.
She started and went pale. If he’d been paying closer attention he might have noticed the slight tremble in her hands.
“This is very strange,” she said, cautiously. Then after an uncomfortable pause she faced him squarely, an expression of perplexity visible upon her face. By way of explanation, she began: “Last night I dreamed that I was on the beach (one reason I ventured out in such weather) and a man walked slowly, deliberately, toward me in the gusty wind. When he reached me, he said: ‘“I will tell you who I am.’” And then he paused with the kind of curious significance we sometimes find in dreams, and whispered: “I am a poet.” Then she glanced out to sea, and it was smooth as glass. . . A line of whales were swimming south, undetected. “What do you think of this?”
He remained silent, but her words had made a deep impression. He turned the silver Aztec ring over and over again and gazed out to sea. Not a whale to be seen in the strengthening storm. No doubt the storm had driven the whales deeper.
“So you too are a dreamer,” he said slowly, quietly. “What do I think? I’m unable to form an intelligent reply. But I have my suspicions.”
“Suspicions?” The word surprised her, but as he offered no further explanation, she stubbornly followed suit and remained silent. She could not fathom this cryptic answer. But if he could leave it at that, then so could she.
“What are we to think? Life is a mystery. We seldom decipher the simplest equations. . . We read what we can.” He searched the ocean for signs of the storm’s intensity. A powerful emotion threatened his equilibrium. He did not wish to be lost in it.
“I think your dream was very beautiful,” he said at last, and there was something in his manner that seemed to dismiss the subject. His apparent lack of interest intrigued her further; she detected a certain decision in his silence, something akin to faith. Whatever the actual reality behind his behavior she was now determined to drop the subject, mystery or no mystery. In truth, what are we to think?
“What’s it like to be a poet,” she said for lack of anything