– 46 –

The Sailor Wants a Friend

Outside the Imperial Fish and Fry
where she eats one scoop of chips with salt
he staggers sidles over and she unwinds
one window of the four-wheel-drive.

He asks and asks, so long he asks.
He speaks and speaks. She raises her shoulders,
palms up. She says with care, it is six fifteen.
Still he asks and asks. She shows him
the watch. Six seventeen now, she says.
He grabs her wrist. I am sorry, she says,
I do not understand.

When the snow melts in spring,
ah her big lap
her flowered smock,
flows over the fields,
so many flowers, much blossom.
Himself he lived in a city apartment
but he has seen the photographs.
You are like my sister
(he says it in Russian),
You are like my mother
(also in Russian), and,
Very beautiful woman, he says
and jig jig, jig jig.
She points to her watch, but has
no hope now he will understand.
She smiles and smiles.

– 47 –

He speaks to this smile, finds
all his English, and like reaching
for a high branch on a cherry tree
says, I love you, jig jig boom boom.

She remembers, the whole of her Russian.
She takes back her face into herself.
Niet she says to this foreign man
and winds up her window tight.

– 48 –

Sailors

At shop doors they read special signs
in their squared upside down alphabet.
Perhaps these say Welcome and No Smoking
No Thieving and All Shop Lifters Will Be and
so on.

Their carry bags with whisky
Their foreign voices
Their not-right shoes
Their suit jackets with
Their not-matching trousers
Their cigarettes that smell funny
Their faces like cold
landscapes, like snow over the ground,
like blossom in April, like burners in an
orchard that will smoke all night to scare off frost.