The World's Largest Lumber Port,
the yellow hulk of Cats winding bayfront chip yards,
betting on high-school football

at the Elks Lodge, bargemen,
abandoned Army barracks,
Japanese glass floats, cranberry bogs,

mooring lines, salmon roe,
swing shifts, green chain, millwrights
passing each other like black paper cranes

from one impermanence to the next,
phosphorescent bay water, two tons
of oyster shells, seagulls, beach glass

tumbled smooth in the surf, weigh stations,
off-bearing, front loading, cargo nets,
longshoremen, scabs,

the Indian casino marquee promising
continental breakfast, star-crowned animals
stitched to blue heavens

behind the fog, log booms,
choker setters, gypo outfits, acetylene sparks
falling from the Coast Guard cutter Citrus,

dredging units, gravel quarries, clear cuts,
scotchbroom taking over the dunes,
smokestacks pocked with peep shows

of flame and soot, the year-round
nativity scene and one-armed Santa
in J.C. Penney's alley window,

my grandmother dying just over the ridge,
mother-of-pearl, sea lion calls
in the dark, low tide at Charleston Harbor,

the sound of calk boots
in gravel parking lots, salmon sheen hosed
onto the street, the arch

of a big rig's empty trailer, sand
in all the moving parts,
floodlights, tie-downs, ridge beacons,

great blue herons whispering
through the hollow reeds, the cat piss smell
of a charred meth lab between the V.F.W. hall

and pioneer newspaper museum,
the rusted scrapyard and tank farm.
The drawbridge spans forgotten coal bunkers,

buried fingerprints of Chinese laborers,
rope-riders and mule bones.
Then there's the rain that never sleeps,

it's fallen for seventeen years
to reach the field below our house
where my father and the machinist neighbor

dying of cancer huddle around
an oil drum burn barrel and smoke cigarettes,
a few weeks of newspapers and wood scrap

hiss into ash, trapped angels
under the wire grate they warm their hands over.
The great heave of the Southern Pacific,

sturgeon like river cogs, barnacle wreckage,
cattle-guards. The last of the daylight,
a broken trellis falling into the bay.