Lift bushel sacks with barrel backs
and we
keep on lifting
till break, water and ale, bread for gruel, slim
oysters still wet from morning pulls.
We
push and pull,
start afternoons early.
To finish before sun goes belly up in the sky
is fat pockets, full stomach and drinking as fog
finally lifts up
and off the marsh. I do it because
I don’t want to go home.
We do it
because we are young muscled
and like the women and the sack,
Ally’s opium cakes on Saturday nights,
fat lumps of sugar on our finger tips.
I like sweets
and listening to soft rain,
a woman’s voice playing fine music on my bones
steamboats coming in every hour
to buy my oysters,
my clams,
shaking rust off their chains before they claim
the open sea for Steam City,
Boston, some port south of Carolina’s elbow.
We pack it in
and spend, spend, spend,
our luck our love our money
fog grows fat, seagulls cry and cry,
spit bones and shells. Somewhere
off in the murk, a chain falls into the water.
