WINTER ELEGY

When the cool fronts gusted through
we called it Christmas.
We'd crank open all the jalousie windows
and for the rest of that year and into the next
the slamming of doors was only the wind's rage.
It blew through our house, diffusing the seaweed
collecting at the canal's dead end,
my mother's cinnamon candles and pine,
sugar apples ripening on the tree,
and at night, blossoms of cacti in the corner of the yard.
Half asleep with the windows open,
I could hear the rustling of palms and bottlebrush,
blinds slapping against screens,
and at some point every night, the scream of a cat fight,
and my mother going out to break it up,
then back to bed. Through my bedroom windows
I'd hear her settle in. That overture
of sighs and low moans and my father's constant snore
lulled me back to sleep, and I never imagined
this was not the way it would always be.

SANDBAR AT SNIPES KEY

Before the divorce, we used to picnic
on the first Sunday of each month, even in winter.

My father would belly his pontoon on the sandbar,
then my extended family swung single file

down the ladder wearing sneakers--
it was too shallow for swimming

and not all sand, but coral heads and bottles,
long-spined sea urchins, perhaps sting rays.

Arm in arm we made a chain from the boat
to shore, in flowered or fluorescent bathing suits,

like a long swatch of milky bufo eggs
to stake our claim on that small tongue of sand.

My father would carve a pit in the beach,
make fire with mangrove limbs,

spear a hog fish and roast it before it was dead,
squeezed lime hissing the fire down.

Then he'd stretch out on the sand, his arms folded
under his head like a sky-watcher.

His snore was like wave-crash. Giggling,
I poured bucketsful of sand over him.

Mixed with saltwater, it was cement.
Then I built a series of castles around him.

He'd sleep like that, pretending not to know
I was there, or was he pretending?

During one of these Sundays, our engine
broke down. And to get us home he jumped in,

pulled the pontoon by the anchor rope over his shoulder,
trudged the three bay miles to our dock.

His hands and back blistered.
That night, he stood out on the back deck

and my mother poured a bottle of peroxide over him
which fizzed like sea foam over his body.

He saw me see him wince, then exaggerated
his wincing with cartoonish eeks and acks.

He let me wind his palms with gauze.
I fell asleep with my head on his scorched chest

despite the rifle-cracks of some John Wayne movie,
both of us in his cigar-burned, soft gray La-Z-boy.

He was fond of saying, Man is greater than any misery.
Out there on the sandbar, it was easy to forget

about my parents' last fight, the smack of his truck door.
It felt good just to dig my hands in

the muck by the shoreline, to try and bury
my father so deep in the earth he'd never leave.

THE WRECKER’S WIFE, Key West, 1841

 

Three weeks and his body has not been salvaged.

Jacob’s crewmates say it was a terrible wind                                                 

that made the sloops slap together like hands

with him in between, down in the water.

Today, the judge declared we never married.

There is a wife abandoned

in Staten Island, a father’s claim to a stolen sailboat.

 

I shake my head. There was a wedding

on the beach. They were all there—

I wore a blue silk dress, a red hibiscus in my hair.

We stood between two palms, and don’t they remember

before we’d said our vows, when the coconut fell, just missing him,

and we all laughed? Such an abundance of conch

and turtle at the reception, and Mr. Pinder played the fiddle,

 

and we drank my grandma’s champagne punch well into night,

then Jacob built a fire and, and someone said

we looked like a bunch of Calusas whooping,

but we didn’t care because we’d not had fun

since the massacre on Jacob’s Indian Key.

They remember, but still, it wasn’t official,

and no one dared say anything as long as he lived.

 

I spend my nights on the beach where we married,

letting the cold stone of the ocean wash over my feet,

expecting his body to shore like flotsam.

I have questions to ask it. 

from Bone Key Elegies