for my father The glistering lamp of the dockyard. A chain link the size of your head, or the length of an elephant’s tusk laid end to end in a steady caravan of lumbering skin. The heaping sheen of the oilblack tide, of the plum shadow of bruise caught in the corrugate of water. Of the heaping corals of rust, like the rough underbelly of lava rock lining each ship’s naked corral, emptied, for a moment, of all the impossible cold of the bay, of the starving white dressing of sky, scumbled by smoke and lit by a white sun gone white. All of the doves lined up on the mouth of the pier. All of them turning, their sooted white cloaks, their inky black eyes. In their ignorance, they scramble to nests in the sky, nest in the rubble of ghosted earth quakes. The rudders, a thousand times bigger