Freshwater Bay

110 david wojahn Freshwater Bay Their meat is prized by Yankee whalers & thus the beach is strewn with upturned shells, Rorsarch yellow undersides, weathering against black sand & too weighty even empty for a man to heft. The rowboat glides shoreward, sand so hot it melts the soles of Darwin’s wellies, FitzRoy joking this is but a foretaste of damnation’s ingenious comeuppances. The tortoises have hewn a path up to the spring, wide & flat enough to manage a hansom or a shay. Ponderous & insensible, they grope their thoroughfare, FitzRoy straddling a larger male, who conveys him some twenty yards, & only when Darwin squats before one, coming level with its eyes, does it hiss & draw its head in. They count two dozen circling the spring, heads below the waterline & swallowing great draughts. Here upon the sparse grass & cacti, a huge old male lumbers toward a much smaller female. His cry, notes Darwin, is long & bassoon-like, a wanton bellow that must carry all the way down the cliffside to the anchored Beagle. 111 Up her carapace the male creeps, as though pulled by some unseen winch. Clangor & the grate of shell on shell: the ceremony commences & shall be longer, Darwin jokes, than a Scots Dissenters’ camp revival, making FitzRoy wince. Bellowing still, The male flays his huge sienna legs above her shell, she paddling farther down into the inky dirt so as better to admit him. So abundant is this world, it must beggar the imagination even of the Most Omnipotent. FitzRoy with his sketchbook hunkers down to render in charcoal their tectonic amours, these antediluvian remnants from creation’s dawn, which he notes to Darwin—busy jotting in his moleskin— has been shown by Bishop Usher to have commenced in 4006 BC. The yawp & clamor begin anew, drowning out Darwin’s reply & by now it is twilight. Silent for once, the men will pick their way down the mountain to their skiff & the panoplied leviathans will lie together long past moonrise & the bright ascent of the Southern Cross, beneath constellations so alien & various they bear no names of heroes, beasts, or gods. ...