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			I.vii George Elliott Clarke Rain-scruffed yellow-stone, weather-wrinkled as bark is like bark, flood-lit by rain; and the harbour is slate, heaving like a black lung — or a cascade of rat's paws tearing at the boats barged against chafing wharves, those tongues cunnilingusing the salt-blasted waves. The wind stinks of pitch or oil; boats wobble back and forth like Liberal Party rhetoric, the keel and rudder uncertain while the Imperoyal Refinery's hellish, deathless flame smudges the night-bitter air, its broth and chowder of pollution. If only snow or rain cascading through smoky, cranky alleys, could tint this city of raw war petrifyingly beautiful! But its history has only blessed horror: the legislature's flanked by Howe, defiant, and a Boer War soldier, La Liberté guidant le peuple. So orange light goes up as prayer and comes down leaf-dark, rotten as crushed cockroaches, and pornographic drizzle lays dirty rain and explicit sleet, this King Lear weather heaps up snow and shotgunned corpses. Winter-closed roses look vase- shaped; the harbour is stone leeching black water, leaking black water, near the winged lion that Venice gave Halifax, the Worker's Sodom, the Vatican of Vice, the Dominion of Doom, where every clock is stopped at 9:06 A.M., December 6, 1917, when eyes spiked on glass, and molten iron rained on the streets and the war came home viciously, and all the light was smoke.
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