Sherry Chandler

and the great boat sank
and the okies fled
and the great emancipator took a bullet in the head
in the head
took a bullet in the back of the head

it was not december and it was not in may
it was the 14th of april that was ruination day

—Gillian Welch from Time (The Revelator)

Sena Naslund becomes our state poet laureate today and so, I suppose, also becomes an honorary poet. Here are the opening paragraphs of Ahab’s Wife:

Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last. Yet, looking up—into the clouds—I conjure him there: his gray-white hair; his gathered brow; and the zaggy mark (I saw it when lying with him by candlelight and, also, taking our bliss on the sunny moor among curly-cup gumweed and lamb’s-ear). And I see a zaggy shadow now in the rifting clouds. That mark started like lightning at Ahab’s temple and ran not all the way to his heel (as some thought) but ended at Ahab’s heart.

That pull of cloud—tapered and blunt at one end and frayed at the other—seems the cottony representation of his ivory leg. But I will not see him all dismembered and scattered in heaven’s blue—that would be no kind, reconstructive vision; no, intact, lofty and sailing, though his shape is changeable. Yesterday, when I tilted my face to the sky, I imaged not the full figure but only his cloudy head, a portrait, glancing back at me over his shoulder.

What weather is in Ahab’s face?