What Ever Happened to Moby Dick?

The Chase

Threadbare in coat,
heart, body, and brain;
I’ve always wished to paint
a vast canvas,
porous and infinite,
a glowing white:
the color of pain, a tall glass of milk,
the hue of bleached stains.

I’d take my
time perfecting each stroke
giving each its own name.
I imagine crying over the canvass-
bleeding to make a living
so that I could paint
in the torturous dark
a blinding white.

A chronic white
without flaw, influence, variation.
Friends lost to the time
spent.
Fighting great battles, enduring
great costs so to
paint white the world before
my staring eyes.

And even better,
after years painting bare
canvas, I would die somewhere between
the start and the finish-
leaving a large corner
an off-white:

Unfinished.

And somewhere someone would smile,
someone would cry.

The undertaker left to ponder
the life of a man
wasted,
slouching over
a vast, ancient, rolling sea
of white.