All The Ships Have Come and Gone
By the tidal inlet, slime stains the waterwalls
an aberrant, abnormal green,
a mossy smear of chemical phosphorous
(disseminated by widemouthed industrial drains)
in which tiny plants take residence
— clover leafs with minuscule hairy roots —
sending clear sucking tubes into the jellymass.
Soaps impregnate the stinking banks.
(In my mind’s waterways, there is the “Indian in his glade …”)
Poisoned sluice plump with bacterial froth and synthetic burrs,
the fragrant waters of the soapy rivulet flow
past the clock tower, over the Indian’s riversnake, around
the pylons, their immense bolts screwed so tight
one will need a blasting-fire tool — that will drop sparks
at your feet — to enter.
Painted-over padlock: you cannot insert a key.
A cutter comes to release the locked machinery.
Less grand than the girdered bridge with its cathedral’s choir:
Come to our poisoned place and join our humble Assembly.
Below the bulbous bollards and the enormous
balls of waxed rope, the particles abate,
metal settles in the creek and rusts the cold clam beds red.
These are the meats you must not eat.
O but a swan swims singly, paddling its paddle feet
(a swan that I now call Emily’s swan).
It nibbles at the mossy walls, its underbelly stained chartreuse,
nibbles like minnows at the greasy layer of human waste.
Are there visions of masted ships in these crooked trees?
And what they carried here and what they made?
Do you run softly and flow, or do you only bubble and stagnate?
So many ships have come and gone.
So many varied ships with varied freights.
Sailing past the retracting bridge, and its octagonal house
with rounded windows, a turreted tower, so unlike
and yet so similar to the one occupied by Yeats.