Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain. Russell Thornton

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      At a window overlooking water—container ships

      and bulk carrier ships lying at anchor

      framed in front of us. They’re always there,

      I hear a voice say. As if the ships were the same ships

      that sat there twenty-four or forty-eight hours ago.

      As if, in the middle of the night, the ships did not

      arrive and drop anchor at exact latitudes and longitudes.

      And tugboats did not come and bring the ships to dock,

      and other ships not arrive and take the first ships’ places—

      in the middle of the night. As if the ships were not

      emptied of what they brought here and loaded up again

      while the ships’ sailors took their hours’ shore leave

      to go to a bank, visit a doctor, talk with a priest,

      buy a blouse or bracelet for a woman back home.

      As if, between sundown and dawn, the ships did not depart.

      And every two or three days, a new ship and new crew

      did not sit at each terminal wharf. As if it was not

      now a new ship visible outside the window.

      All night, out on the water, the ships’ horns send out

      sound signals for their arrivals and departures,

      and all night, in inlet-filling fog, the ships’ horns

      send out long blasts, long repeating notes—accompaniment

      to the circuit of sleep in the houses along the shore.

      New ships and crews come, new products are brought

      from faraway locales, and new loads of coal, sulphur,

      lumber and wheat are taken to faraway locales.

      All night, when gulls come up from the inlet

      through cloud and rain, gull after gull takes up

      the same insane-sounding cry of unfathomable

      emergency in a wilderness of water, and circles with the same

      single message that seems wound and unwound

      as on a wire anchored somewhere unknown to any gull

      in the inlet circling and circling through its tides.

      All night, the outsized ships come and go—all night.

      As if they were not, each of them, the same ship powering

      over the glowing deep blue water-globe. As if the voice

      at this window had not been with me all along,

      waiting inside my hearing. As if it was not

      the voice of one more myself than I can know.

      As if this one’s home had not always been here

      where he could see an anchor-place and hear gulls.

      Nest of the Swan’s Bones