-with the songbird on Bannister's Wharf-

with the young woman much to my liking,

a summer-dense outdoor restaurant

on the active wharf where the big boats tie-up––

the glass-glistening hulls of the fuel-powered yachts,

the wood-hulled jib-rigged, the square and gaff-rigged beauties,

a bright Newport night of starlight and brushed incandescence,––

the sweltering waitresses lured there from France
and Denmark, from Italy, Germany, Israel and Australia,

from the African Continent, they've come here, and the southern Americas,
the Barbary Coast, from the southend and the north end of Fall River, they've come
and from whale-hearted New Bedford, gliding table to table, as gracefully
as the great breeching sperms, as swift as the shuttles through the thread
of the clacking power looms, and too, from Antarctica, the West Indies,
the deep Sargasso and the breathless air of the Horse Latitudes,–– from the east-side
of Providence, (Gina, spit that gum out!) and the far-side of the Moon,

from Mecca, from the Mount of Olives, and, well, from who the hell knows where,––

the New Word, the Old World, the Otherworld, they've come to this place speaking

broken English which, when delivered with convincing attitude, garners the fat tip

at each table's turn; it's here they've come, here to this bustling port-of-call where

I say to the lovely, olive-throated jazz singer:

"let’s eat and drink and feel at one with the touch of saltwater at our skin.

let's become as barnacles clinging to the keel of this place, take-in
the never ending caw of the gulls, the great romance in the towering mast-headers,
and inhale the mossy perfume of the pylons and then, and then, my lovely one,

let's walk southward along the wharf in the direction of the Americas, to another

place like this to see and feel and do the astonishing same things!"