Blocks off gulls fell to investigate
What they took to be sardine cans
On the river shiningly, but who contended
For his thick brown fish were rather wives
With boiling dishes in their eyes,
Women estranged from live water and flavorless;
Where cats did not wait for the heads,
The scene was that strong,
I saw the mistaken sea-birds from a corner,
Hearing the fisherman shift his feet in the brine,
The fish gasping without resignation, the shoppers,
Half-tame now at noon,
Naming the coins that routed all of the cats
And rendered that whole quarter poorer.
THE WATERWAYS
On favorable terms I have sometime been
Diminished imperceptibly, like an island city
Where the streets, far-sighted in their time,
Take half the land at last and give no thoroughfare.
Now a commission views it from the air
Too late by years to layout parks and traffic
On anything like the scale the site suggests.
But wherever I strike the waterfront, afternoons,
Moves evenly one of two gull-soared rivers:
It boils with salt tide or its headwaters,
It is at the full with earliest water, changing the banks;
And here the city, all port, gives on the ocean generously
Like a man who, if with regard to love only,
Is determined he will not take terms.
