Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator;
he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys
in every odyssey, one on worried water,
the other crouched and motionless, without noise.
For both, the ‘I’ is a mast; a desk is a raft
for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak
of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft
carries the other to cities where people speak
a different language, or look at him differently.
—Seven Seas in Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990)
There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
…I wait ’til the sea calm.
—“spongebob”
1. PRAELUDIUM
billy woods flows with the planetary currents—a circular transmission of human conditions and migrations—cosmic forces that propel the Atlantic waters in motion. Nothing is abstract, as abstraction leads to violence. For woods, a Flaubertian mot juste always washes ashore, arriving as needed. His terrain is not brickdust but motherfucking humus—call it mother-fecund, if you wish.