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.

Copyright Credit: Dave Smith, “Near the Docks,” from The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Copyright © 1985 by Dave Smith. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems (1985)