Near the Docks

There was a fire in the night. Across the street I slept among the others as the ashes snowed upon small pines. I slept owning nothing, a child ignorant of fortune’s blistering story, the playful flash in the dark, the unseen smolder that would leave us revealed, unchanged. I said my prayers for luck but the man trying to live in two houses answers me now, losing neither the old one whose windows burst with weariness, nor the one half-built whose roofless, green timbers he would leave unfinished like a vision. I had climbed there all summer to smoke. Awake, I found him sitting at his stool halfway between the houses where I would go each morning. The story of the sea would be upon his tongue, his hands weaving the wire to a trap, making the careful seams to catch a scuttling crab. Beyond him, his wife already had begun to stretch her wash, indifferent in that early light, and a dog lapped from the ruts of the fire truck. I believed little had been changed by fire, only his toolshed limp as a black sail left in a heap, and a new hole in the landscape. This was an old place where no one came, luckless, desperate, eternal as guilt. In silence I greeted that old one. But now I remember seeing also, as if for the first time, the shocking gray face of the sea. It loomed up human and beautiful as far off the figures of boats crossed, worked, and seemed to sink while they burned in the sullen sun.