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Here

Betsy Sholl 
Wharves with their warehouses sagging
   on wooden slats, windows steamed up
      and beaded with rain--it's a wonder

weather doesn't wash them away.  In time,
   they seem to say, you'll be gone too,
      your belongings left on a quay for the taking...

What's there to do, but stroll over cobbled streets,
   listing letters you owe, books, food, anything solid--
      cement stairs, bike chains, manhole covers,

anything to weigh yourself down.  But later,
   sleeping, you'll run like rain downhill
      back to those ramshackle buildings

stacked like crates, windows pitted with salt,
   doors barely held on their hinges.
      You'll be there, on the slotted dock

with its barnacled pilings, its green
   weedy skirts that shimmy in slow time
      against wave wrack and slump: at home

in that floating world, as water unravels
   masts into rippling flags.  You'll hear
      engine grind, halyard clank, and fog's

ghostly horn declaring water takes all
   in the end.  Or is that the voice of some other
      shadowy self just wanting to see

how insubstantial we are, how loosely moored
   to everything solid--and yet, here,
      for a time, within this wash of oilslick

and cloud drift, this long-stemmed sea,
   star-floating, gull-feathered, where all things
      that have to end, begin.
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