Dock Four

For you, living by a thread

It moves, as you, in aquiline regurgitations,

This that lifts you there, to that shore beyond,

On which crouches another wingspan of cold-cut windows,

Catching the polluted gems of seafoam and downwind edges.

The possibilities of March curling forth across the bitter glass,

Lay out their forms, rusted and choked with hourglass sand

As wares across a blanket, sold to the same dry, blue town

Caressed with mild, insincere interest.

Here, as there, the boat is a vessel for habit,

A tide-bound turn to disease and familiarity

When the more modern has exhausted dry its frosted veneer

And you take your pennies to the water, weighing this worth

Your nausea pulsates against the calligraphy of vellum and velour

The gaze stapled and stitched to pattern, inevitably,

Now you contemplate liberation as a thing contingent on stillness

As before your freedom lulled on distant waves

There, the sky-rimmed garden from which you once tore yourself from the backdrop

Spitting the skin of your throat to the vast out there

Little space for a little god, to whom you ask humbly

That the ferryman may not be the man to bend to your blood on the deck.

How far this gentle tide, this spoiling silt does unfurl,

How sharp and sure shall we stand against the wailing engines and shout,

That the green gaze of that copper woman may soothe us

That here is as good as anywhere

So long as you rarely stand still.