water street, a poem taken from SALVAGE

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3. St. John’s 2003

Water Street, above, (alone), watching the weather smolder in all directions. To the north, and out of view, a set of earlobes pretends they cannot hear, dusk, an embryo? The horizon beginning to heal, waiting on the doorstep for a maternal breeze: a tinting of birth, separation, a trace that the earlobes and the sounds of the city that no one listens to, cannot see. A young flower submerged beneath a potted maple… A stroke of unfamiliar language, an immense thought: how it is that we are all still here? That the line on a cracked sidewalk matches a drainpipe between two cafés?

Water Street, swaggering like a deck of cards, a set of keys bulging the front pocket in old jeans, a stitch already tight… A man standing in a number of spots, simultaneously, carries nothing but an untenable hum, yet he doesn't stumble. And he says all the right things, how are you today, sir? I’m a lawyer can I take your case? Resilience is as fleeting as a splash from a small puddle, a sip of beer, or a slip of the wrist that hides the painters’ keel…

Water Street, seaweed? What else would one expect? Bars and traffic lights, pastels courting newspaper boxes like grainy streaks on a shop window… Today, the damage has become washed and dried, needed, and the bakery on the corner delivers loaves to fishing boats preparing for a week away. Their long assail, the massing sea. Hills that rise to an insufficient green, red columns floating like an apple peel near an unclean sink… how is that roads always turn light brown and windows have holes that totter and bounce within their black frames? Maybe the flickering face has hands to rest in, a dark wall in the sky that brushes a distant mountain with bristles unraveling. There’s history above the clouds, (the canvass)… a fold of skin that falls like the bottom jaw of a long-forgotten explorer, a new cove, an apartment in the south of the city getting noticed by the corner of an untrained eye.