Star Anchor

Star Anchor

This is not my home.  How did I get so far from water?

But on this strange, smooth surface I am making too much

noise.  I wasn’t meant for this…The rain has stopped,

and it is damp, but still not wet enough to please me.

                                    From “Strayed Crab”

                                    Elizabeth Bishop

I’ve kept it all from falling apart, a face on a threaded rod-

five point spread against the thicker brick, flat as

a face-up wheel buried in the river.  You know, really

I’d already covered the crumble, the weight of the walls

falling into one another, as though, when the mill

workers went home and there was only one man to keep it,

and the ghosts of children who’d died there and then to play

there forever,

was a wall bowing to the one in front of it, the way

a gentleman would slip into his waist and wrist with one slick

shift and it would be sky he’d see in the shine

of his shoes, it would be a whole night of drifting and dipping,

his shoulders a shawl for a shadow’d old woman.

I am old too.  I am numerous numb and old.  The hands

that wrought me, the hands that screwed me here are up the grass,

are gone in wars, are shodding a draft horse for the fair,

are nodding at a bottle of memory, are anywhere

but on one of my points—aside from the furnace and the opening

of morning (and because the maples have grown over the receiving

door dock) I see little of light and I....  But I’m holding up.

I am.