You don't see his sort anymore
except in certain well-worn streets
pushing his bow-wave against the brunt 
of years and blowing for a tug.
Tobacco smoke on his meerschaum skin 
yellows the cheeks like old charts 
of the sea bed, and his rusted brow 
is grooved by the warps of time.
He rolls with a list to starboard 
through constant drag of sea and net 
and, if true to his own dictum, wears 
a tarry marline amulet around his neck 
against such ills as cannot be cured 
by the rawness of onion or rum.
See him riding at anchor at the street end,
or berthed in an hour of sunshine 
at an open sham-four door; look 
through a parlor window to his past 
and see his portrait—by Jerome—
in RNVR rig and silver frame 
and always outboard facing, moored alongside 
a colour tinted bride, netted 
like a butterfly, ephemeral glamour.
She sees him now the way he was 
and forgets to wind forward the clock.
But his memory fathoms greater depths, 
lowering a lead-line to sound the seas 
of childhood and the chanting school 
whose echoing walls failed to out-shout 
the sounds of the sea and crumbled 
to the running tide of a school boys mind.
He plumbs now the ebb-school hours 
of slack-water evening, rippled 
by eddies of fish-girls freed 
in a clangor of clogs from the oak-chip 
smokehouse, where a dozen restless cowls
once swung to the whim of the wind
and a lifetime’s talk of splitting-knives,
of haddock-kits and tenterhooks.
Now, heaving in the plumb line, he returns
to port, to fish-wife’s tongue and pumice face,
her busy arms conger-strong and firm.
She, too, in her way, was a ruler of waves.

Sitting by the slipway of his season
provisioning the ship for wintry seas,
hoarfrost whitening his topmast truck, he
fears the black ice thickening his shrouds.



In Britain, RNVR stands for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.
Established in 1903, it was a reserve force of the British Royal 
Navy made up of civilian volunteers who received naval training 
in their spare time and could be mobilized during wartime.