At the Fishhouses

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.