The great ghosts of the town
Up and down,
Each a gray, filmy thing,
Go by.
Sudden a brief, wet sky! —
A file of poplars vague with spring.
Drips the old garden there;
See, its torn edge about,
Scarlet, remote,
Tulips flare,
The length of one thin note! —
And are put out.
Seven days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding
through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rat's neck in the teeth of a scuffling
mastiff.
Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon.
Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled
in granite languages on a gray sky,
A night harbor, blue dusk mountain shoulders against
a night sky,
And a circle of lights blinking: Ninety thousand
people here.
Among the Wednesday night thousands in
goloshes and coats slickered for rain,
I learned how hungry I was for streets and
people.
I would rather be water than anything else.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps.
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor's breast
And the harbor's eyes.