Here, greedy sea
swallows up the land
in big briny gulps.
Folks with
wind-burned cheeks
and hooded heads
walk a main street lined
by bellow-blistered buildings
and thick with salty mist.
Every shop blasts its heat,
so rows of windows weep;
the whole town becoming
one long streak
of bleary glass
and ferry fleets.
You can stumble inside
any sobbing shop and find
a marine menagerie—
composed of anything
that could be found
washed up on
the sloshing shore,
then tacked to creaky,
peeling walls as
tourist-trap décor.
Here, everything
is streaked
in grime and gray,
every tree,
every house,
every chimney,
every lane.
Even the youth are
silver and worn
by the coming and going
and the smoke sky
each morn.
A ship horn bounds
through veils of quick cloud,
the port folks shiver
at the mournful sound,
filled perhaps by the
ancestral dread
of ocean dredge
devouring their town.
Or perhaps they’re afraid
that the hungry tide
might one day decide
it’s satisfied
and leave this gray,
blistered place
exactly as it stands—
for that’s what I’d fear
if I lived in the drear
of shabby old
Port Townsend.
pm poetry 