At the Fishhouses by Paisley Rekdal

At the Fishhouses

And the black water under the boats with their pools

of bilge rainbowed out like rinds

of steak fat, the salt thick

in my nostrils, but pleasant, too: details

I still remember from Bishop’s poem, everything

else about it lost. At the docks, 

I watched my friend slip

in her rubber boots; the wide, wet planks 

glossy with mosses. You must walk

duckfooted to get to the boats, the black and orange

fishing barrels, the air with its tang 

of rusted metals. There are always hooks

and anchors to be found, nets and scrapings

of wood planed by chisel, the way

my great-grandmother was said

to have worked, employed as a shipwright

on the city’s waterways in the ’30s according

to the newspaper clipping my grandmother 

photocopies for me each Christmas. 

The description of her gunmetal hair

and slim torso clad in overalls, the hands

she held out for the Times reporter

(“Callused,” he noted, “strong as a man’s”)

does not recall the woman

I remember for her farm in Bothell

before it became a Seattle suburb, helping me gather

raspberries from the long canes 

she planted by her porch. We spent an afternoon

together sweating in the same long-sleeved

checkered shirts she’d sewn us, according

to the photo I no longer have, and cannot remember

whether is the source or confirmation

of this memory: only the papery, gray-green

streaks of road dust on the canes, a bowl

of chipped porcelain inside of which

were raspberries. Very red, very sweet, furred

like my friend’s upper lip I remember

between my teeth as we stood

on the docks. The smell

of iron and winter mist, her mouth

like nothing I have tasted since.