None of us go there anymore.
It’s a defunct resort
town in winter. The rust-colored sea’s thick waves roll over
sideways, slowly. The boardwalk collapsed
and was hacked into fist-sized chunks—to sell
as pieces of The True Boardwalk, reliquarilly.
The Old Hotel, after the termites ate their fill,
became (and turned the same color as) the potbelly
of dirt on a grave. Still pink, the pink
of a pint of blood in five gallons of water,
the cotton candy wagon’s cotton candy maker spins
not a skein, not an airy thread.
That man with eight-foot stiff-kneed legs is gone, his hat now
a blacked-out lighthouse
at the end of the stubby shorebreak.
A whole generation, or two, came here
in the years between the wars.
It was as if certain things never happened.
The whole island is an under-lit room.
You’re in it, now, we’re all in it now,
and an eight-foot bucksaw
leans, more than a little bowed, cocked, taut
against a wall.