Wharves with their warehouses sagging
on wooden slats, windows steamed up
and beaded with rain—it's a wonder

weather doesn't wash them away. In time,
they seem to say, you'll be gone too,
your belongings left on a quay for the taking . . .

What's there to do, but stroll over cobbled streets,
listing letters you owe, books, food, anything solid—
cement stairs, bike chains, manhole covers,

anything to weigh yourself down. But later,
sleeping, you'll run like rain downhill
back to those ramshackle buildings

stacked like crates, windows pitted with salt,
doors barely held on their hinges.
You'll be there, on the slotted dock

with its barnacled pilings, its green
weedy skirts that shimmy in slow time
against wave wrack and slump: at home

in that floating world, as water unravels
masts into rippling flags. You'll hear
engine grind, halyard clank, and fog's

ghostly horn declaring water takes all
in the end. Or is that the voice of some other
shadowy self just wanting to see

how insubstantial we are, how loosely moored
to everything solid—and yet, here,
for a time, within this wash of oilslick

and cloud drift, this long-stemmed sea,
star-floating, gull feathered, where all things
that have to end, begin.