The Bight(1)

The Bight 海湾

　　At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

　　White, crumbling¹ ribs² of marl protrude³ and glare

　　and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches,

　　Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,

　　the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,

　　the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

　　One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire

　　one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

　　The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock

　　already plays the dry perfectly⁴ off-beat claves.

　　The birds are outsize. Pelicans⁵ crash

　　into this peculiar⁶ gas unnecessarily hard.

　　it seems to me, like pickaxes,

　　rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

　　and going off with humorous elbowings,

　　Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar

　　on impalpable drafts

　　and open their tails like scissors on the curves

　　or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.

　　The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in

　　with the obliging air of retrievers,

　　bristling⁷ with jackstraw gaffs and hooks

　　and decorated with bobbles of sponges.

　　There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock

　　where, glinting like little plowshares,

　　the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry

　　for the Chinese-restaurant trade.

　　Some of the little white boats are still piled up

　　against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,

　　and not yet salvaged⁸, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm.

　　like torn-open, unanswered letters.

　　the bight is littered with old correspondences.

　　Click. Click. Goes the dredge,

　　and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

　　All the untidy activity continues,

　　awful but cheerful.