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And the black water under the boats with their pools of bilge rainbowed out like rinds of steak fat, the salt thick in my nostrils, but pleasant, too: details I still remember from Bishop’s poem, everything else about it lost. At the docks, I watched my friend slip in her rubber boots; the wide, wet planks glossy with mosses. You must walk duckfooted to get to the boats, the black and orange fishing barrels, the air with its tang of rusted metals. There are always hooks and anchors to be found, nets and scrapings of wood planed by chisel, the way my great-grandmother was said to have worked, employed as a shipwright on the city’s waterways in the ’30s according to the newspaper clipping my grandmother photocopies for me each Christmas. The description of her gunmetal hair and slim torso clad in overalls, the hands she held out for the Times reporter (“Callused,” he noted, “strong as a man’s”) does not recall the woman I remember for her farm in Bothell before it became a Seattle suburb, helping me gather raspberries from the long canes she planted by her porch. We spent an afternoon together sweating in the same long-sleeved checkered shirts she’d sewn us, according to the photo I no longer have, and cannot remember whether is the source or confirmation of this memory: only the papery, gray-green streaks of road dust on the canes, a bowl of chipped porcelain inside of which were raspberries. Very red, very sweet, furred like my friend’s upper lip I remember between my teeth as we stood on the docks. The smell of iron and winter mist, her mouth like nothing I have tasted since.

Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water. The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail, with small iridescent flies crawling on them. Up on the little slope behind the houses, set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, is an ancient wooden capstan, cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, where the ironwork has rusted. The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population and of codfish and herring while he waits for a herring boat to come in. There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, the blade of which is almost worn away. Down at the water’s edge, at the place where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp descending into the water, thin silver tree trunks are laid horizontally across the gray stones, down and down at intervals of four or five feet. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin. Bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear, there are some

As Death often sidelines us it is good to contribute even if so little as to shovel some earth into earth.

for Gerald Stern At sixteen I was so vulnerable to every influence That the overcast light, making the trash of addicts & sunbathers suddenly clearer On the paths of the city park, seemed death itself spreading its shade Over the leaves, the swan boats, the gum wrappers, and the quarreling ducks. It took nothing more than a few clouds straying over the sun, And I would begin falling through myself like an anvil or a girl's comb or a feather Dropped, tossed, or spiraling by pure chance down the silent air shaft of a warehouse, The spiderweb in one fourth-floor window catching, in that moment, the sunset. For in such a moment, to fall was to be simplified & pure, With a neck snapped like a stem instead Of whoever I turned out to be, Wiping the window glass clear with one cuff To gaze out at a two-hundred-year-old live oak tethering The courtyard to its quiet, The tree so old it has outlived even its life as a cliché, And has survived, with no apparent effort, every boy who marched, like a wilderness Himself, past it on his way to enlist in Lee’s army, And now it swells gently in the mist & the early sunlight. So who saved me? And for what purpose? Beneath the small angel cut from cheap stone, there was nothing But my name & the years 1947-1949, And the tense, muggy little quiet of a place where singing ends, And where there is only the leftover colored chalk & the delusions of voodoo, The small bones & X’s on stones signifying the practitioner’s absence, Entirely voluntary, from the gnat swirl & humming of time; To which the chalked X on stone is the final theory; it is even illiterate. It is not even a lock of hair on a grave. It is not even The small crowd of roughnecks at Poe’s funeral, nor the blind drunkard Laughing there, the white of his eyes the unfurling of a cold surf below a cliff— Which is the blank wave sprawl of fact receding under the cries of gulls— Which is not enough. * I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now, Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled, Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A. I should go back again & try to talk my friend out of his diet Of methamphetamine & vodka yogurts & the look of resignation spreading over his face Like the gray shade of a tree spreading over a sleeper in the park— For it is all or nothing in this life, for there is no other. And without beauty, Bakunin will go on making his forlorn & unreliable little bombs in the cold, & Oswald will adjust The lenses on the scope of his rifle, the one Friend he has carried with him all the way out of his childhood, The silent wood of its stock as musical to him in its grain as any violin. This must have been what they meant, Lincoln & Whitman, joining hands one overcast spring afternoon To stroll together through the mud of Washington at the end Of the war, the tears welling up in both their eyes, Neither one of them saying a word, their hands clasped tightly together As they walk for block after block past The bay, sorrel, chestnut, and dapple-gray tail swish of horses, And waiting carriages, & neither one of them noticing, as they stroll & weave, The harness gall on the winters of a mare, Nor the gnats swarming over it, alighting now on the first trickle of blood uncaking from the sore; And the underfed rib cage showing through its coat each time it inhales Like the tines of a rake combing the battleground to overturn Something that might identify the dead at Antietam. The rake keeps flashing in the late autumn light. And Bakunin, with a face impassive as a barn owl’s & never straying from the one true text of flames? And Lincoln, absentmindedly trying to brush away the wart on his cheek As he dresses for the last time, As he fumbles for a pair of cuff links in a silk-lined box, As he anticipates some pure & frivolous pleasure, As he dreams for a moment, & is a woman for a moment, And in his floating joy has no idea what is going to happen to him in the next hour? And Oswald dozing over a pamphlet by Trotsky in the student union? Oh live oak, thoughtless beauty in a century of pulpy memoirs, Spreading into the early morning sunlight As if it could never be otherwise, as if it were all a pure proclamation of leaves & a final quiet— * But it’s all or nothing in this life; it’s smallpox, quicklime, & fire. It’s the extinct whistling of an infantry; it is all the faded rosettes of blood Turning into this amnesia of billboards & the ceaseless hunh? of traffic. It goes on & I go with it; it spreads into the sun & air & throws out a fast shade That will never sleep, and I go with it; it breaks Lincoln & Poe into small drops of oil spreading Into endless swirls on the water, & I recognize the pattern: * There there now, Nothing. Stop your sniveling. Stop sifting dirt through your fingers into your glass of milk, A milk still white as stone; whiter even. Why don’t you finish it? We’d better be getting on our way soon, sweet Nothing. I’ll buy you something pretty from the store. I’ll let you wear the flower in your hair even though you can only vanish entirely underneath its brown, implacable petals. Stop your sniveling. I can almost see the all night diner looming Up ahead, with its lights & its flashing sign a testimony to failure. I can almost see our little apartment under the freeway overpass, the cups on the mantle rattling continually— The Mojave one way; the Pacific the other. At least we’ll have each other’s company. And it’s not as if you held your one wing, tattered as it was, in contempt For being only one. It’s not as if you were frivolous. It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all. Riding beside me, your seat belt around your invisible waist. Sweet Nothing. Sweet, sweet Nothing.

Lord of wondrous workings, grant us understanding— now at the hour of closing. A chosen few are called, their eyes toward you lifting— they stand exalted in their trembling now, at the hour of closing. They pour forth their souls; erase, then, their straying— and grant them, Lord, your absolution now at the hour of closing. Be a shelter for them through all their suffering; consign them only to rejoicing now, at the hour of closing. Show them your compassion, in your justice turning on all who brought oppression to them— now at the hour of closing. Recall their fathers’ merit and count it as merit for them; renew their days as once they were, now, at the hour of closing. Call for the year of grace— the remnant flock’s returning to Oholìbah and Oholàh— now at the hour of closing.

An idea is sometimes sweetened by refusing to be expressed, if it attends, solicitously, to this failure, and urges us on to discover the true impediment to its adaptation. In that spirit, and bearing that intention within us, we note here, as elsewhere, there are generally three alternative courses. The first is simply to accept without question an explanation someone in our proximity, and whom we know, proffers and then elects to modify out of concern that small details are escaping to set up camp opposite what is being said. The second is to surrender one’s reluctance to withdraw from the presence of an unsolved problem by grabbing crudely at vacant affirmations that nothing further need be done, that everything to be accomplished was accomplished well before current advocates approached the threshold, coaxed forward by the desire to indulge their own vanity. The third is to remain absolutely uncommitted to any specific course, and to insist that the process begin anew each time, contending that no information will ever be adequate to the task of judgment, that the requirements, as they evolve, will make each element moot, or at a minimum place the likelihood of resolution in ever greater doubt over time, with the paradoxical effect that the impulse to continue is not thereby diminished, only channeled into a narrower, more determined form. Although no benefits are likely to accrue from this last course, it’s unquestionably the one most often followed, owing perhaps to people’s need to test the strength of a membrane designed to repel assault, or their perennial enchantment with kaleidoscopic complications spreading over the earth, as time walks through the sky.

Brown gas-fog, white beneath the street lamps. Cut off on three sides, all space filled with our bodies. Bodies that stumble in brown airlessness, whitened in light, a mildew glare, that stumble hand in hand, blinded, retching. Wanting it, wanting to be here, the body believing it’s dying in its nausea, my head clear in its despair, a kind of joy, knowing this is by no means death, is trivial, an incident, a fragile instant.    Wanting it, wanting with all my hunger this anguish, this knowing in the body the grim odds we’re up against, wanting it real. Up that bank where gas curled in the ivy, dragging each other up, strangers, brothers and sisters.    Nothing will do but to taste the bitter taste. No life other, apart from.

Suddenly, I stopped thinking about Love, after so many years of only that, after thinking that nothing else mattered. And what was I thinking of when I stopped thinking about Love? Death, of course—what else could take Love’s place? What else could hold such force? I thought about how far away Death once had seemed, how unexpected that it could happen to someone I knew quite well, how impossible that this should be the normal thing, as natural as frost and winter. I thought about the way we’d aged, how skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew dim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you.

This is how it was: they had their own churches, their own schools, schoolbuses, football teams, bands and majorettes, separate restaurants, in all the public places their own bathrooms, at the doctor’s their own waiting room, in the Tribune a column for their news, in the village a neighborhood called Sugar Hill, uneven rows of unresponsive houses that took the maids back in each afternoon— in our homes used the designated door, on Trailways sat in the back, and at the movie paid at a separate entrance, stayed upstairs. Saturdays, a double feature drew the local kids as the town bulged, families surfacing for groceries, medicine and wine, the black barber, white clerks in the stores—crowds lined the sidewalks, swirled through the courthouse yard, around the stone soldier and the flag, and still I never saw them on the street. It seemed a chivalric code laced the milk: you’d try not to look and they would try to be invisible. Once, on my way to the creek, I went without permission to the tenants’ log cabin near the barns, and when Aunt Susie opened the door, a cave yawned, and beyond her square, leonine, freckled face, in the hushed interior, Joe White lumbered up from the table, six unfolding feet of him, dark as a gun-barrel, his head bent to clear the chinked rafters, and I caught the terrifying smell of sweat and grease, smell of the woodstove, nightjar, straw mattress— This was rural Piedmont, upper south; we lived on a farm but not in poverty. When finally we got our own TV, the evening news with its hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan seemed like another movie—King Solomon’s Mines, the serial of Atlantis in the sea. By then I was thirteen, and no longer went to movies to see movies. The downstairs forged its attentions forward, toward the lit horizon, but leaning a little to one side or the other, arranging the pairs that would own the county, stores and farms, everything but easy passage out of there— and through my wing-tipped glasses the balcony took on a sullen glamor: whenever the film sputtered on the reel, when the music died and the lights came on, I swiveled my face up to where they whooped and swore, to the smoky blue haze and that tribe of black and brown, licorice, coffee, taffy, red oak, sweet tea— wanting to look, not knowing how to see, I thought it was a special privilege to enter the side door, climb the stairs and scan the even rows below—trained bears in a pit, herded by the stringent rule, while they were free, lounging above us, their laughter pelting down on us like trash.