At the Boatyard

What I love at the boatyard,

at the end of Good Templar Place,

is the scraped, accidental intensity

of color. How could intention ever match

the mottled peacock of the Paolo Marc,

scrubbed to unforgettable azure?

Two of the racks of pink

paint-flecked spars

are empty, this morning,

but the third holds the lavender,

milky, rust-blurred bulk

of the Carla Bee, out of Boston

—long out of Boston, I’d say,

from the way her ancient propeller

is bearded, Confucian.

The same spars held,

just yesterday, the wire-brushed green

of a hull named Dora.

Dora! Green peeled to blue

then cloudy red then

the original green still staining

the steamed wooden arc:

fabulous tones, glazed

to transparency by saltwater.

I think that green

is what I’ve wanted

all my life: uncompromised,

warmed in the March sun

here where the sheds provide

a little shelter,

at the juncture of elements.

A pair of rusty tracks

curve up out of the harbor—

a railway arriving from the bottom

of the sea? This border

between worlds is dotted

with planks and buckets and ropes

but sinuous still as any wilder coast,

and the drowned boat off the pier

is every day more waterlogged,

less salvageable; it glows,

in the weak sun, apricot.

No one hauls her up

to the emptied cradles

which have sent their work

back into the harbor

stripped and buffed

and shining. And some days,

only when I am not looking,

a slick brother head

watches from between the lapping,

mirror waves. He is whiskered,

placid, and keeps his distance,

lone ambassador

of the marine. He lives

in some darker gradation

of that desired green—oh,

who knows how he lives?

And if the self is half-submerged,

gone in that watery, other element,

might not the secretive swimmer

be befriended? My sleek double

chucks his marvelous head and dives.