a slippery million silvery fish-heads with their bead blackcurrant jelly eyes all looking up from the metal bins at the back of the docks. the men or women are fleshy armed with knives and in reddening gut-slick plastic aprons. all around there's the thud of knife on fish on wood, the slither of fish-heads silking into bins. who knows what will happen to the fish-heads? but they arrive on boats in great nets with precious shiny bodies and in the rain everywhere whispers silver scales sequins.

if you crouch down and peep through the cracks in the great wooden boards that make the floor, you can just see the water down below black and slinking. everywhere there's heavy ropes and iron chains seeming to hold the docks in place, so they wont just drift off, slip gently away out to sea, separating themselves from the rest of land with its mither of voices and the slippery fate of fish.

hammer creak gull-silver shriek                            shush

listen far off now in the night the child's in bed waiting for the night deep yawn of the foghorn's soft amber sound far out on the edge of sleep, where the mouth of the river makes shadowy announcements

and now remember this how the child's palm is upturned and wide open waiting for knowledge of love or travel as the plastic pink fortune fish arches and twists to uncurl a certain future into which the docks are sailing