History hovers by a café window, 
facing out onto a still summer bay.
Motes flicker in a sun of aeons.

The story of the bay, the port, is of trawlers,
shipping seas to Greenland, Finistere,
salt air, the storms, the resolve,

and back in the café, the trawler-wives,
muttering a port’s anxiety,
shaping a hive of close concern.

The men are nowadays on building sites,
on tills, in call centres,
but older women here still shuffle spoons,

still turn the shards of that history’s jetsam,
with the buzz of their intimacy,
the nearness of their murmur.

The smokestacks are drifting fumes 
and there’s bruise-coloured cloud this morning, 
but walking on Front Street, as he meets her,
walking her grandma’s dog,
is the new girl, Cindy Lightfoot, who says
how pretty the fishing boats look, going out,
and he’s irritated
(knowing the town’s drifts and losses, 
his uncle having fished
off the Harbour Queen for years,
and knowing that only Spanish trawlers fish
from Milford now) but he still thinks
how strutting-sweet she walks
and talks, so they fix the date, 
Segadelli’s on Saturday,
and this becomes a pocket of love’s logic,
under a bruised blue sky.