At low tide like this how sheer the water is. <br />White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare <br />and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches. <br />Absorbing, rather than being absorbed, <br />the water in the bight doesn't wet anything, <br />the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible. <br />One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire <br />one could probably hear it turning to marimba music. <br />The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock <br />already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves. <br />The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash <br />into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard, <br />it seems to me, like pickaxes, <br />rarely coming up with anything to show for it, <br />and going off with humorous elbowings. <br />Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar <br />on impalpable drafts <br />and open their tails like scissors on the curves <br />or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble. <br />The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in <br />with the obliging air of retrievers, <br />bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks <br />and decorated with bobbles of sponges. <br />There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock <br />where, glinting like little plowshares, <br />the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry <br />for the Chinese-restaurant trade. <br />Some of the little white boats are still piled up <br />against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in, <br />and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm, <br />like torn-open, unanswered letters. <br />The bight is littered with old correspondences. <br />Click. Click. Goes the dredge, <br />and brings up a dripping jawful of marl. <br />All the untidy activity continues, <br />awful but cheerful.<br /><br />Elizabeth Bishop<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-bight/
