About What's Decent

About What’s Decent

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life

Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.

When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,

Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.

                                                                Wallace Stevens

                                                                LE MONOCLE DE MON ONCLE

The faces of the pipe-fitters, in broad day color,

I wonder if they’ve seen themselves? hung

in this museum rejoicing the work of their dust- rusty cough

their rivet driven whole hog son-of-a-bitch

whisper when they duck deep between the ribs, under

the pitch thick cap of the ship they’re building.  Today is

all weld and metal, (though there’s the Mary E in dry

dock) and a century and a half ago it was all pitch and a whole

country of soft and hard wood shipped

(there’s irony there) and logged out

to this river spot to be cut and trimmed

to rise out rib-spread to soon (months? a year

or two) take water, break it on her face in any wet wind

or foul or fair sea, coy tip of the cheek to the men who

made her.  Do they ever know her life afterwards,

were they ever invited, to watch her slide from the dry

dock into tidal river water, toward coincidence of sinking

or sailing, now always sunk some in salt’s wet bottom:

bones and old rope or guy wire or boys faces

hanging (coincidence?) next to the painting they could

maybe never name but could I’m not shitting you

tell you the inside out of because they made it:

the boat: and they made it out of every rib holding

true up to the sky of quitting time hoping 

for something decent, like she'll be the one, 

she’ll  spend her life taking on

nothing but mild boys in the belly like any expecting

and respectable mother.