Belying the brick intercourse
of dock and cafe, architects
are binary in cyberspace —

invisible — but for some mundane
purpose such as hailing a waitress,
when they materialize in suits,

wiping their glasses while the window-
washer winks and dreams of roses
Oregonian in Maine.

Naming these dribs of wisdom, ‘pearl,’
those drabs of halogen, ‘chlorine,’
a father struggles to explain

the nature of his job. His girl
asks him to send her dinner back,
fashions an origami crane

from a clean placemat, and for luck
drowns it in the gray harbor shore.
Knowing port towns from towns, yachtloads

of Company pensioners on tour
crawl slowly out from the long morning
shadow of DuPont. Next door

the Gearbulk Mozu Arrow docks.
A man in a dry raincoat spits
‘Slip some hawsers round those chocks

and moor this poor ugly bitch.’
Goggled and diving, or landlocked
in grim, Coke bottle lenses we

see what we want to see. So says
the school of Landscape as Projection:
The moon as female or the tides

as moon-shaped. Landslides as kissing
decades of beach-front homes goodbye.
Or recently: mutations blinding

certain salt water populations,
endowing others with third eyes
trailing like red floats at the end

of severed fishing lines – eyes towed
behind thin tendrils of raw nerves.

© 2002 Christian Peet.
Originally published in The Adirondack Review