Ninepin

Ninepin APRIL GENTRY Inevitability comes rumbling and I, Sisyphian and lame, rise again to answer. Our fall is always in progress. Prisoner in my freedom, nationless citizen, I scratch the sand from my beard and watch another white man throw the ball, destroy the diamond, wait for the nine resurrected by my hand. Where, for me, are eight like others with whom to stand and fall? Where, for me, the plank to mark the limits, from end to end and side to side, the span and bounds of being? Tribe by tribe the pins fall to rise. Always the juggernaut, the cannonade, the shots fired ashore from the safety of sea. The diamond born beneath the bark of the artu, the diamond tapped ink-wise into bronzed skin at lip and wrist and spine, those diamonds, C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 105 A P R I L G E N T R Y those, what hand awaits to lift again when for them, too, the heavy ball rolls? At night, the waves sing to me their wild secrets. I dream of shapes that lurk in their depths of endless arabesques, of cornerless ripple and rise of huddled mountains, hazed leviathans slumbering on a distant horizon. 106 L E V I A T H A N ...