“In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes? ... Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be very long in following.” —Moby Dick, Ch. 74

Hair inside me and nails inside me, a creature like a vole
Spending months plotting and burrowing out. Sometimes I 
Gasp; I want to ask the gas station attendant, the person
Giving me trouble at the pharmacy, Don’t you know
There are eyes inside me? I can see the inside of myself
And watch from outside and inside as we grow. Two
Brains floating. Forty claws. Get thee away. Other 
Times I hurl and hurl, and nothing comes. Three months
Of sickness like being a whaler at sea on the hunt
For something I can’t see, only feel, enormous underneath,
Somewhere between god and monster and nothing yet at all
Might kill me, but the beauty—I’m turning Ahab
Who swallowed a watermelon seed—
                                                             I was warned. 
My eyes, my new beard
Reveal me. I hold a second, secret face,
Unknown even to me—like that 
Of a clock that keeps its own time, slows its tick each day—
                                                                                                If Ahab 
Could become the whale then part ways—yes, two-headed,
Double-pronged approach of before. 

Yes, 

Yes, love is an ugly science:
      
                                            And I could harpoon it—

The whole swooping cape of bloody aftermath—a mean relief 
In knowing what’s next—an arrival 
Into what? into who? Two. A years’ long tracing of it away
From here, from near; the both of us then, seeing 
Only once again, 
                            out to sea.