The water shrugs, its heavy blindness.Telephone wires scan and creasecloud scud’s bubbling lead,their copper threads are empty now, webof eerie interference, half-caught lyrics,a sound like the ocean.A sound like the ocean heard againand again; a sound like a way of listening.Salt drift drives through a puff of mist.With the changing of the lightdown the harbor boulevardstorms a torrent of quiet metal—a metal torrent, which freezesfor another light, the cars magnesicand pearlescent, sexual hearses likeblack capsules of champagne.They wait there steaming and red lightstreaks them as if they were wet.But they are not wet even afterthis hour’s rain; their shells forget,and the eyes inside are the force of their forgetting,lonely pilots. I have called you a friendso we seem to both have liedin service of a small idea:small, silvering in the ideadid we lie together on a linen bier.Not-us flowed through us, a thorn milk,a blindness. When you swam from the worldI came with you. But you kept on; like mist,you receded faster than I could.If I lie, if I sleep,I can still hear you receding. I listento the slender waves pulse the harborback and forth beneath small craft, neverstrong enough to break, their forcegathered and relost.Gathered and relostbetween two gaunt long armsof crushed stone.