when code is a poem

the crusty old goat

on the back of the boat

i used to ride to the city

said he wrote code

for the trip to the moon.

we all stood at the stern

on the 4:25

with our V&Ts

or our wine.

the scofflaws who smoked,

defying the prohibitive signs,

sent curling plumes

of Marlboros or Camels

over the water.

he said that his watch

had more memory

than Apollo, so the code

had to be parsed

line by line

to fit in the limited space.

more like a poem

than the sagas

of bloat for the typical game

or word processing suite.

now he was writing

some kind of thing

for a digital sniper sight

that corrected for windage

and the arc of the flight

that a bullet travels

from muzzle to target

a thousand meters away.

he finished the dregs

in his glass

went back to the bar

for another.

the herring spawn

was particularly strong

that year. as we passed

the mouth of raccoon straight

we watched ten thousand gulls

on the bay along paradise drive

diving and feasting

on roe. the crusty old coder

returned to the stern

just as a humpback

broached a few yards

from where we stood

smoking and joking.

we all gasped at the sight

of a sixteen foot tail

upright in the green waters

where it hung for a moment

like a black tower.

then slid with a hiss

back into the deep

to swallow an army of fish.