It takes a while to walk through the long wharf
which is enclosed against the elements.
Purveying the connecting properties
to the new lease, our party sauntered there,
in the bright glare of light deflecting night,
the Chinaman, the Frenchman and the Swede
(each in a pressed suit, just off an airplane,
and eager to get back to the hotel,
to sink in privacy into a drink
in a bright glare of light deflecting night),
their uninformed eyes taking little care
(the tour was peppered with such agent’s talk
as never hesitates in its intent,
was not designed for one to really look),
while the collector of fine bric-a-brac
who counted millions in the warehoused goods
rubbed off a bit of calculating pride
on objects he could not commit to sell,
stealthy foundations of his capital:
each type of bottle from each type of year,
each printed calendar that was produced,
all manufactured products, everything
preserved unopened in its packaging
just as it was when joie de vivre was king
(the Englishwoman served him to this end,
looking upon him as upon a friend).
The long wharf was unstable in the wind.
We didn’t realize it was a wharf
we had come through, but at the end of it
a weather-rotted window peered out on
the ocean, we could see how far we’d come
held up above the sea by massive beams,
a long way out, and swaying in the wind
with little place to walk on the loose floor.

I thought of falling out into the sea.
The ocean is blue, but many shades of blue
and white and green, and black and grey, combined
in motion, rising towards us on a page
behind which light hides echoes of nothing.
Nothing is all we know of what is there.
It seems so heavy, heavier than dreams,
as deep as dreams would ever think to go,
in the black murky movement that’s not there.
I want to turn the page. I am afraid
of what is out there, the horizon, ships—
depthless darkness, uncertain vantages.
I pulled back from the wind as from a nail,
and turned to go. There on some long tables
(I had been squeezed between them and the wall
when I had had my vision of my fall)
whose sides were built up so that they were bins,
I saw enormous quantities of slips
of paper, very thin, filed in long rows.
I opened one to see what slips they were.
Upon each one, and now I saw the ships
that must have been as real as you or I,
the name recorded of each voyager
transgressing the horizon on a ship
who entered here, each entry had a slip—
a continent of ghosts had landed here,
thick on the tables, only the fog moved
and the long wharf stayed up and swayed in place.