over the second deck, standing three-high on each other and topple as one into the dark Niagara, coming up draped in garlands of slime. Adrift in memory is that faceless man who set aside his beer and mumbled onto the dock to climb to the highest tier. We knew the black water like the inside of our mouths: the cable-locks and every underwater point where holding-piles grew like stunted oaks. We yelled our warnings and watched him leap, tumbling like a bag of bones. He hit six inches of water, forty foot of wood, hooked somehow by the seat of his pants like a bar rag ready to ge wrung out and carried back inside where it belonged. Arnie, you were just too short for your own good; nothing could make you tall: not the extra heels nailed drunkenly to both shoes, hidden by dungarees dragging the floor, your chef's hat rising a foot overhead, that bowery face somehow always in pain, those snakes curling their ink the length of your arms; nothing, not even the milk crates you walked like a bridge in front of the stoves, tending the burners like a man too tall for such a bend; nothing did anything, Arnie, but remind us that the inches you mourned were somewhere beyond that mountain hell-hole of pots and pans where you always came up short. When death comes, it will find them here where we tucked them away like used kleenex, she in one wing he in