Arriving Gdansk Harbor, 2000: The Women We Have Left

Sunk in steerage, we are crossing

the blue-silver Baltic. After making love she stands, cold

in the bathroom’s white doorway—familiar

curve of her thighs—sleepily slurs, “you’re too pretty for your own good.”

I pretend not to hear, and go up to deck.

Imagine my father’s mother: young

in muddied green gardening pants, raspberry-bloodied gloves, on hands

and knees over her husband’s purpling orchids,

tearing them from their rain-warm beds. And then, there she is

on the front porch—from the house-radio

a woman sings, “There’s another mare in his stall”

—standing, feet planted, waiting

for him, bare arms crossed. Ready. This was Louisville, 1961.

A gull with one wing dragging

like a banner humps down shore. Smoke stacks reach above fog.

Saw grass, horse tail, and sedge spike,

the coast beneath a fat coat of snow, window-climbing snow.

Ice on the river is a gypsy shimmer

like a school of perch, some frozen smoke, some mold plate.

Two men speak with their shovels’

sluff into slurry. Our ship banks into Port Nowy’s archipelago

of crane-tipped quays,

and vessels, all rust and tea-kettle gray. A night wind moans

like two barges

butting. Fog clothes fishing-boat lights below gulls,

tangled and tangling.