How comes it that under his own hand, St. Augustine confesses that, until his thirtieth year, he was a very sad dog?

—The Confidence-Man

The battleship gray behind the swaying
yews could replace curtain fabric,

those drapes in that long-lost house
in Westport Point—modest stone wall,

immodest maple, angry dogs.
The river hunkered below the land,

the sea behind the dunes.
I drifted through childhood,

a page of newspaper blown
down a road crumbling into verge,

past the prim Gothic Methodists
and antiquarian cemetery, past

the general store’s genteel porch,
the miniature post office, the tavern

warning us never to enter,
onto the rotting wharf. There

among long necks spitting at tourists,
oysters refusing interrogation,

lobsters like brute black tanks
holding their demonic congress,

I at last felt at home.