The Voyage Home

The social instincts ...
naturally lead to the golden rule.
—CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man

Holding her steady, into the pitch and roll,

in raw Midwestern hands ten thousand tons

of winter wheat for the fall of Rome,

still swallowing the hunger of the war:

the binnacle glows like an open fire,

east-southeast and steady,

Anderssen, the Viking mate,

belaboring me for contraband,

my little book of Einstein, that

“Commie Jew.” (So much for the social instincts,

pacifism, humanism, the frail

and noble causes.) I speak my piece

for western civ: light bends ...

stars warp ... mass converts ...

“Pipe dreams,” says the Dane, “pipe dreams.”

“Well, mate, remember,

those Jewish dreams made nightmares

out of Hiroshima, and

blew us out of uniform, alive.”

He stomps down off the bridge; some day

he’ll fire me off his rusty

liberty: I read too much.

The ocean tugs and wrestles with

ten thousand deadweight tons

of charity, trembling on

degrees and minutes. Anderssen

steams back in with coffee, to

contest the stars with Einstein, full ahead.

We haven’t come to Darwin.

Freezing on the flying bridge,

staring at the night for nothing,

running lights of freighters lost

in a blur of blowing snow,

we hold on through the midnight watch,

waiting out the bells.

With Einstein in our wake, the tricks

are easier: liberty

churns on, ten knots an hour,

toward Rome. One starry night

we ride at last with Darwin on

the Beagle: endless ocean, sea

sickness, revelations

of Toxodon and Megalonyx—a voyage

old as the Eocene, the watery death

of Genesis. The going

gets rough again, the threat of all those bones

churning the heavy swells: Anderssen,

a true believer, skeptical,

and Darwin trapped in a savage earthquake,

the heave of coastal strata conjuring

the wreck of England, lofty houses gone,

government in chaos,

violence and pillage through the land,

and afterward,

fossils gleaming white along

the raw ridges.

“Limeys.” Anderssen puts his benediction

to empire: “Stupid Limeys.” After that

we breathe a bit and watch the stars and tell

sad stories of the death of tribes, the bones,

the countless bones: we talk about

the war, we talk about

extinction.

Okinawa, Iwo Jima:

slouching toward Tokyo, the only good Jap

is a dead Jap.

We must get the bomb, Einstein writes

to F.D.R., waking from

the dreams of peace, the noble causes:

get it first, before

the Nazis do. (The only good Nazi

is an extinct Nazi.)

At the death of Hiroshima, all day long

we celebrate extinction, chugalugging

free beer down at the px, teen-

age kids in khaki puking pints

of three-point-two in honor

of the fire: no more island-hopping now

to the murderous heart of empire.

Later, in the luxury of peace,

the bad dreams come. “Certainly,”

Darwin broods, “no fact

in the long history of the world

is so startling as the wide and repeated

extermination

of its inhabitants.”

Off somewhere to starboard, the Canaries,

Palma, Tenerife: sunrise

backlights the rugged peaks, as Darwin,

twenty-two years old, gazes at

the clouds along the foothills.

Longitudes ease westward; it’s

my birthday: twenty-two years old

as Tenerife falls into the sunset,

I’m as greedy for the old world

as Darwin for the new, Bahia, Desire,

the palms and crimson flowers

of the Mediterranean, clear water

dancing with mines. Ahead of us

a tanker burns; the war

will never end.

“You talk a lot,” says the melancholy Dane.

“You sure you’re not Jewish yourself?

You got a funny name.”

“Well, mate, I’m pure Celtic on one side,

pure Orphan on the other: therefore half

of anything at all—Jewish, Danish,

what you will: a problem, isn’t it,

for Hitler, say, or the Klan,

or even Gregor Mendel, sweating out the summer

in his pea patch?”

The fact is, I know those ancestors

floating through my sleep:

an animal that breathed water,

had a great swimming tail,

an imperfect skull, undoubtedly

hermaphrodite ... I slide

through all the oceans with these kin,

salt water pulsing in my veins,

and aeons follow me into the trees:

a hairy, tailed quadruped,

arboreal in its habits, scales

slipping off my flanks, the angle of my spine

thrust upward, brain

bulging the skull until

I ride the Beagle

down the eastern trades to earthquake,

to naked cannibals munching red meat

and Spanish grandees with seven names

crushing the fingers of slaves.

Who are my fathers? mothers? who

will I ever father?

I will sire the one in my rubber sea-boots, who

has sailed the seas and come

to the bones of Megatherium.

From the war of nature, from famine and death,

we stand at last creators

of ourselves: “The greatest

human satisfaction,” Darwin muses, “is derived

from following the social instincts.” Well,

the thing I want to father

is the rarest, most difficult thing

in any nature: I want to be,

knee-deep in these rivers of innocent blood,

a decent animal.

Landfall: Yankee liberty discharges

calories on the docks, where kids

with fingers formed by hairy

quadrupeds cross

mumbo jumbo on their chests

and rub small signs for hope

and charity.

Liberty, sucked empty of its

social instincts, follows the Beagle

down the empty avenues of water

to amber waves of grain, to feed

the children of our fathers’ wars,

new generations of orphans, lives

our quaint old-fashioned bombs

had not quite ended.

Alone

on the fantail

I hear the grind of rigging, and

Darwin is beside me, leaning on the rail,

watching the wake go phosphorescent.

We’ve been out five years, have seen

the coral islands, the dark skins

of Tahiti; I have questions.

“Darwin,” I whisper, “tell me now,

have you entered into the springs of the sea,

or have you walked in search of the depth?

Did you give the gorgeous wings to peacocks,

or feathers to the ostrich?

Have you given the horse his strength

and clothed his neck with thunder?

Who has put wisdom in the inward parts,

and given understanding to the heart?

Answer me.”

The breeze is making eddies in the mist,

and out of those small whirlwinds come the words:

“I have walked along the bottom of the sea

wrenched into the clouds at Valparaiso;

I have seen the birth of islands and

the build of continents; I

know the rise and fall of mountain ranges,

I understand the wings of pigeons,

peacock feathers, finches; my mind creates

general laws out of large

collections of facts.”

The rigging sighs a little: God

is slipping away without

saying goodbye, goodbye to Jewish dreams.

“But the activities of the mind,”

Darwin murmurs, “are one of the bases of conscience.”

Astern the pious Spaniards go on praying

and crushing the fingers of slaves; somewhere

the Mylodon wanders away,

out of the animal kingdom and

into the empire of death.

For five billion years

we have seen the past, and

it works.

So this is the final convoy

of the social instincts: the next

time missiles fly to Rome,

they will carry Einstein’s dream of fire,

and afterward there will be no need

for liberties, hope, or charity.

Now we ride the oceans of

imagination, all horizon

and no port. Darwin

will soon be home, his five-year

voyage on this little brig

all over; but when will I

be home, when will I arrive

at that special creation: a decent animal?

The land is failing the horizons, and

we only know to take the wheel

and test the ancient strength of human struggle,

remembering that we ourselves, the wonder

and glory of the universe, bear

in our lordly bones the indelible stamp

of our lowly

origin.

Copyright Credit: Philip Appleman, “The Voyage Home” from New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996. Copyright © 1996 by Phillip Appleman. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press, www.uapress.com.

Source: Poetry (March 1981)