Inventory at the Ferry Landing
after Walt Whitman
I have been counting, and I will tell you what I counted.
The woman with the folded coat who has not folded it again in an hour, the boy repeating the timetable to himself as though it were a prayer he had been given badly, the man selling nothing, standing beside the thing he is not selling, the gulls, who are the only ones here without an appointment.
I count the shoes that face the water and the shoes that face the road. I count the hands in pockets. I count the hands that will not go in pockets. None of this is a metaphor. The boat is late. That is all.
And still — when the horn goes, and the whole dock leans forward at once, we lean the way a field leans, having agreed on nothing, having agreed on everything, having agreed on wind.
Whitman's long lines pile up particulars until the crowd becomes a single body. This poem tries that accumulation on a smaller stage — one dock, one afternoon.