The breakwalled harbor
holds sea-locked lives
as docklines stretch, then sag,
stretch, then sag
on the moon-sucked surge.
Mary tends a seaside bar, mends wounds,
dodges brawls. She escorts
the drowned and found to their graves.
The drowned and lost
langour in her dreams.
Fuel-dock Harry
rolls out hose, tops-off tanks,
ices the holds. Corporate pockets
take the cash. Harry
shut it down one day
with a two-barrel blast in his shack.
Harbor master Jim, widowed
now, patrols the dusk-dim
moorings abob in his wake
as complaints of gulls
land on cormorants black as dread.
They dive, beak death
to minnows and silver needlefish.
Bouy bells clong and clang
socked in a shawl of fog.
A raft of kelp, with its crew of flies,
shades a shale-toothed reef
as I watch phosphorescent swells
pilfer the helpless shore,
and this saddens me at times,
as I walk the beach,
feel the sand,
the mountain it had been,
being pulled from around my feet
to lie for eternity beyond the light.
