All Sail No Rudder

Reading All Sail, No Rudder, I feel as Hawthorne must have felt reading Moby-Dick;

"...eternity spread before him and the mysteries of life played out against its backdrop."

Fred Whitehead's poems approach eternity again and again, seeking access, expressing wonderment at how our minds and spirits try to reach it, try and fail and try again. So many attempts, so many failures; yet the efforts are never in vain. Consider "the heron": rising in the dusk "as if she knew/exactly where the portal is"