Atlantic City

In the forties my grandmother worshipped
sand as pale as Irish skin, the sirens
of casinos on summer afternoons.
One night, walking home from a dance,
a corsage red as a heart on her wrist,
she heard the footsteps of a man behind her,
quick and slow, quick and slow.
These were the months of the boardwalk murders,
the curfews and pocketknives slipped into stockings,
but in the end she was saved by a gate—a latch
she knew and he did not—and a sprint to the front door,
while a neighbor’s lights came on, yellow
as a cat’s eyes in the dark.

In the fifties she married a man who drank
away the scalded bodies of Nagasaki, and
how many nights did she wake then to the rattle
of a latch in the yard, the footsteps
of a man at the edge of her bed,
so her daughter could have a daughter who
loved the ocean too but saw
the wreckage of a different war.

 

The Foreigners Who Trained With My Husband
a tanka

They brought their wives to
that hot Texas base to have
fine, Yankee babies.

How lonely those dark, bellied
women were, always smiling.

 

 

Smoke

Beside the highway, a tower of black smoke was rising
like a phoenix over the treeline, and a dozen cars were parked
on the overpass, the drivers leaning over the railing
with their doors flung open. Getting out of my car,

I was knocked back by the smell; it was a smell I had known
only once in my life, standing on a hill in New Jersey
as the ash floated out of the City. But when I moved closer
to the side of the road, I could tell it was not a building on fire,

but some kind airplane—and in the blare of the sirens
I couldn’t hear what the woman next to me was saying, but
the car radio was saying it was a jet, a pilot had gone down
on Birdneck Road—and for a moment in the April glare,

I thought I could see my husband climbing over the edge
of the railing in his flight suit,
until my phone rang, and it was the skipper’s wife
calling to say, it wasn’t one of ours, it wasn’t one of ours—

and only then did I turn back to the crowd on the overpass,
all those people with their hands over their mouths,
and all I could think was how three minutes later
it might have been my car down there, and it might

have been my husband’s plane, and what God is this
who stayed the union of our darkest imaginations?