TIAMAT

If you look as if you tip well your guide
May point to a shadow in the corner
Of the Kraken's dream. "That's Tiamat,"
He'll say, "saltwater goddess and dragon.
Last seen in reality 1700 years ago
In Antioch, swallowing St. Margaret.
She's apologized many times for that
But Antiochene saints bear grudges
So Tiamat deems it prudent to live here
Outside the lawful realms. Leave her something --
A bead will do, or a key or a feather --
And chaos, I've heard, will be your friend."

JUST THE FACTS

          The Kraken has slept since before the world’s first beginning and has managed to stay asleep on the ocean’s floor through every beginning since, even the extravagantly loud ones and the one made mostly of screeching colored lights which Coyote made to win a wager. So long has he slept that his dreams have put on substance and walk about as men, though their way in the world is seldom easy.

          If you look at Moxon’s edition of the Collected Poems (though you never bought a copy and were never given one, one has appeared on your shelves) there is a poem about the Kraken which Alfred Tennyson wrote when he was 18 or so, in which he summarizes the Kraken’s fate which is, at the end of the world to “rise roaring to the surface” and die. Tennyson, however, died well before the Kraken, and was waylaid on his way to the afterlife by the ghost of his friend Edward Fitzgerald.

          When they thought of Tennyson, his friends usually did not first think of his being a great poet. Cigars summed him up for some; others thought of his beard, his extravagant sorrow over Hallam’s death, his temper, or his grandly fluent profanity. For Fitzgerald, the essence of Tennyson had communicated itself to the hats he wore, which were no sooner clapped on his head than they underwent peculiar changes, as if their identity had become fluid. It is a rare if pointless gift to be able to effortlessly make a silk top hat fancy itself a sombrero.

          Fitzgerald had been a noticing man, and had become a noticing ghost. He had been shadowing Tennyson’s spirit for some while and was sure it had started out bare-headed. Somehow, it had acquired a hat of even more than ordinary disreputability. “Tennyson, that is an appalling hat!”

          “Fitz? How glad I am to see you! Strange; I never imagined those as the first words I’d hear after I died.”

          “I had something much more impressive prepared but that hat has driven them out of my head.”

NOTE FROM A KRAKEN

Over time the kraken's dreams
Have filled up with sea wrack and flotsam
From sunken ships. On stationery
From a ship that will go down in 1912
He writes with a pen that, as warranted,
Works underwater. "Dear Sir Alfred,"
He begins, "Though we have not met
You will know that I am a sea monster
Who's been sleeping since the world began.
Lately, while idly leafing through

The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse
I came upon your sonnet, The Kraken.
To my surprise you have written that
Some meddlesome angel will eventually
Poke a spear in the ocean, making it boil.
(I must say, I would like to have a few words
With whoever thought arming angels
Was a good idea). At that -- I am still
Following your poem -- I will wake up,
Roaring. (As who wouldn’t at being boiled?)
Then, you write, I will rise to the surface
And die.

                  Again: I am to wake, roar, rise, die.
This came as a shock. Until now I have cherished
A range of possibilities. In my grander dreams
I have become the Slade Professor of Art
And lectured to crowds of eager aesthetes.
More modestly, I assumed I might support myself
By clerical work or, at the very least, rampage
Through some great Eastern metropolis.
Frankly, I no longer see the point of existing
And, as you are the cause of my perplexity
I turn to you for counsel, trusting you will resist
The urge to quote yourself on mine not to reason why.
Yours faithfully,
                    Microcosmus Marinus, Kraken."

WHEN BABA YAGA WAS YOUNG

I knew Baba Yaga, the old Muse said,
When she was young and fat and kind;
This was in the old days when everything
Was undetermined and Excalibur did not know if he
Was to be a sword or a man or perhaps a bird
Coasting idly on his green-flecked wings.
The kraken was wide awake those days
The soul of every party, not dreaming
He would spend his life in dreams.

MEETING

Great jags of rock there were and scree
And broken shingles though surely no house
Had ever stood there. Unfriendly shapes,
Dimly seen, darted in the water -- such things
As may feed a sleeping kraken waiting the world's end
So he can wake and roar and rise and die.
All that is worst of me sat looking in the dark water
Not angry, for a change, but only sad and tired
I sat  beside him; he seemed too wretched to be feared
There was nothing to say; the debts between us
Were ones I had left unpaid.

                                            Every wicked urge
Has his own wicked urge who follows him about
Tempting him to commit good deeds.

KRAKEN

Alfred Lord Tennyson was tall

And smoked cigars. He swore

With enthusiasm. He’d recite Maud

Even when no one asked him

(Perhaps especially when no one asked him)

A lesser poet would not have dared

To wear hats so ancient and terrible.

On his deathbed he opened his eyes

(A peculiar shade of hazel they were)

To ask a visitor if she’d been taught

How to dance a sarabande.

He interrupted his death to rise

And make a slow demonstration.