Dream Barker

We met for supper in your flat-bottomed boat.
I got there first: p in a white dress: p I remember
Wondering if you'd come. p Then you shot over the bank,
A Virgilian Nigger Jim, and poled us off
To a little sea-food barker's cave you knew.

What'll you have? you said. p Eels hung down,
Bamboozled claws hung up from the crackling weeds.
The light was all behind us. p To one side
In a dish of ice was a shell shaped like a sand-dollar
But worked with Byzantine blue and gold. p What's that?

Well, I've never seen it before, you said,
And I don't know how it tastes.
Oh well, said I, if it's bad,
I'm not too hungry, are you? We'd have the shell .
I know just how you feel, you said.

And asked for it; we held out our hands.
Six Dollars! barked the barker, For This Beauty!
We fell down laughing in your flat-bottomed boat, .

And then I woke up: p in a white dress:
Dry as a bone on dry land, Jim,
Bone dry, old, in a dry land, Jim, my Jim.


From HOME DEEP BLUE (Alice James Books, 1988)