Greetings from Marblehead
Dear
Sister,
The
rocks are just where we left them
The
lighthouse has forgotten all the photos
we
posed with it towering behind
If
ever there were shipwrecks,
only
their wet ghosts recall
The
cottonwoods don’t remember
every
cycle green to
gold to gray sticks
splintering
blue air above shove ice
The
nearest island knew all along it was Kelly’s,
even
though we could never figure if it was
North
Bass South Middle or
Johnson’s
The
seagulls scrounging benchside trash bins
might
as well be the same birds
we
charged into with outstretched arms
as
if to say:
if
I cannot fly then you must
And
if my bare feet are cooled by
Lake
Erie wave foam sploshing mossy boulders
then
yours must
instead hover
beneath your
suspended feather bellies
waiting for
your next wet landing.
Gone Camping
Mom
sneaked beers into the campground, for after
dark
with s’mores. Dad home with dishes, cats, and
unpaid
bills. She stared at the fire, fed it logs, fed
us
canned hash and cheese puffs. We kids played
poker,
wagering pretzel sticks, through vast, starry hours
without
clocks, wakened by eventual sun and lure
of
beach. We knew there was planning—lists on yellow
legal
pads, geometry of cramming blankets, aluminum
cots,
cooking pots, and firewood in the boxy van—but
it
wasn’t up to us. Now, camping isn’t hopping, shoeless,
in
the van. Now the planning—the lists of atypical foods,
the
goading of my children who fear dark and insects,
the
tent to pitch and dismantle, the cleaning and stowing
of
gear after—is chaos in my tidy life. Camping now
is
just to repay Mom for years of laundering sandy
sleeping
bags, pillows dusted in blown ash—as if I
owe
her for our escapes and her own. It’s not as if
she
had needed us there to witness her perched
on
her unfolded chair, watching waves. She never
patted-firm
the sands of our castles, dredged our
moats,
called Polo to our Marcos. One August day,
my
neighborhood woke at two a.m. to torrents of rain,
basements
five-feet full with murky water, drowned
furnaces
gurgling, boxes of outgrown shoes and
Christmas
tinsel sunken like pirate doubloons. That day
the
Blanchard River engulfed our town and more upstream
and
down. That day that thousands lost their cats and cars
and
mattresses, I was supposed to go camping. My van
dutifully
crammed, Mom, on high ground, furious when
I
called, said my roads were the river. Helicopters surveyed.
Boat
wakes sloshed Main St. storefronts. Families fled to
shelter
cots, sobbed on CNN, waited days to sog home, to
scoop
muddy floors bare, to shovel rubble, curbsides
mounded
with moldy chairs, pianos and dolls, garbage trucks
constantly
rumbling. Yet I was only me, disappointing her
back
in her city, somewhere beyond all of my water.
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