Providence Nocturne: Two Portraits

TUGBOAT MAN 

He rides an old tugboat, slathered in scum,

a stubby, inelegant craft, good only

for pushing or pulling, decades unpainted,

its underside roiled with barnacles.

He owns a fleet of them, proud

amid the beer-can condom flotsam

of the shallow bay. Nothing

enters this harbor without his help.

Oil tankers, ocean liners, barges laden

with toxic ash or scrap or lumber,

all lost without his men there, tugging,

pulling, day and night, fair and foul.

He squints for his hated rival, that upstart,
for two old families ply the upper Bay,
each in its own eyes the elder, the better.
Their captains' proud tonnage slides by
and even at near collision no nod, no hoot
of the horn acknowledges the other.
Each waits to buy the other out
at the Grim Reaper's auction house.

Strange he seems in his suit and tie,

one of those New England faces

with skin pinched tight as a drumhead.

He has just come from his club,

the ancestral, restricted one

from whose leather chairs the scions

of older families chide those of the younger,

and the cowed waiters dare not confuse

the pecking order in the reading room.

Me first. My family was here

with Roger Williams. He's just

a johnny-come-carpetbagger.

I won't touch The New York Times

if he's pawed through it first.

The talk had been, as usual,

about those god-damn interlopers —

Jews on the library board, Italians

helping to run the historical society,

women running amuck. “Don’t ask me

to kiss the ring of that Episcopal bishop,

a woman! a woman! Next thing you know,

they’ll be marrying lesbians, and men to men!”

On the tugboat, everything seems clear:

the clean, colonial line of the hill,

those proper white steeples, those mansions

from the days of rum, Negroes and molasses,

when business was business and it was

nobody’s business what you bought or sold.

Up at the college with its Greek-front halls

they once taught Latin and Greek and classics.
Look at it now! A woman in charge, a Negress!

Marxist professors! Tattooed coeds! Hipping

and hopping with language unfit to hear!

Out of the closet perverts running the city!

And now the damn Indians everywhere,

dancing on the Arcade steps, wanting their land back!

He looks west, where once good people lived,

streets full of fine Victorian houses.

He shouts at the hulking hills: “Niggers!

Spics and Niggers! Wogs and Slant-Eyes!”

But his voice only reaches the hurricane barrier,

his only audience the wharf rats and one

whom they call —

.

THE FISH MAN

Everyone has seen him. In fact, your arrival

in Providence is marked by the first encounter.

We always ask newcomers this:
“Have you seen the fish man yet?”

His head is conical, and bright red,

mottled, hairless, shiny as an apple,

icthyc and chinless with horrible lips.

One of his ears is twice the size

of  the other, and webbed as well.

Fish man, the Innsmouth look,

we think as he hurtles by

on a bicycle stripped of gears and brakes.

Stand in his way and he calls out

epithets amid a cloud of spittle.

Odd job man, he may be the one

who washes your plates in the unseen kitchen,

   the one who comes in by the back door only..

His furtive broom might clean the pier

     long after closing time,

behind the seafood restaurant,

before he glides away

     into the rat and ‘possum night.

He’s tried all the invisible jobs in town:

an undertaker’s assistant, perhaps –

his hands might be the last to touch you

as he places your body gently

on the furnace conveyor belt.

Has he done the night watch?

    the lobster shift at some printery?

Too bad

there are no more mad scientists to serve!

Who knows where he sleeps,

    or who mothered him?

What’s in his mind? Has he an erotic life,

a round of afternoon lovers,

millionaires’ wives who moan for him?

Does he have a library card?

Has he secretly memorized all of Milton?

Does he have a fondness for lilacs,

fireflies, and gibbous moons?

Has he ever heard of H.P. Lovecraft?

In fact, he is descended from one

of the oldest families,

could take his place,

   if he wanted,

at the club on Benevolent Street.

I'll have that New York Times,

first, if you please.

But we know him only by his kid-cruel nickname,

as we recount to one another

the odd frisson of another 

Peckerhead sighting.