in parentheses

The girls are crying on the seaboard. They swing from ropes and bash into boards, their small fat breasts half bare, clawing at their throats. The water cuts black and makes no sound. Behind the hill across the way the sun sets a waving dread behind Saint Stephen’s stand. The clouds are still, whole bodies bruised black and licked a fire red. The wind sings the sound from across and gibbers through the chewed and twisted open railings, through the many fissures in the cobbled and the smooth-paved, unto the great red cross slanted on the pier like a half-remembered son.
Where the bay is dammed the ships are docked, great ships black with soft flags. The men dig their hooks into the weed-worn wall, they pull with the wind now turning, turning into the fall, pushing them on. With great chinking and agony old coppering chains stretch and fall and drag along, seven hoarse snakes from seven hoary whales, old and bitter in their work, old and bitter in their hate.
The walls then fall like the first break in a mountain of ice and behind the sound they go, grey bridegrooms with slate gem eyes in violent drag wearing orchids in their hair, to erase all sound.