Classic Poem

The tiny windvanes whirl their props,
veer and adjust: black arrows, graceful
in the blue as military jets,
atop the masts of pleasure cruisers returning
to the inner harbor: Comus, Ailsa, Luna Belle ,
passing down the slip of greasy foam and feathers.
Our backs, love, against the rusted iron
railing of that broken jetty, our feet against
steel mushrooms: mooring spools, now never used.
And on the opposite shore, the container port,
the forklifts busy among orange, white, and ochre
oblongs at Warehouse 52. The captain
of the Comus , no allegorist of chastity,
salutes us without words. And what to say
to the joys of his retirement? — his overloaded
duffel of bare abdomen tanned sandy brown,
and his wife, unloosed, buttocks in slow panic
escaping the black bikini as she squats,
blindly presenting towards us, to lift the ropes
and bicker with him on the wind. To banal
insouciance of the pleasure-eating body as it passes
our hope and disgust, say what, from these shores
of black work, where we sit and watch
it sun, it bob on the rhythm of black work?