Saturday Poetry: Oceanid

I've decided to post a poem on Saturdays.  This first one is from my unpublished manuscript, "Turn Left at the Dead Dog".

I moved to New York in the early 90's and temped to make a living.  One of my most memorable gigs was working at a Brooklyn shipyard in Red Hook as a secretary.  I'd take the G to it's last stop, Smith Street, and walk by the Red Hook projects to get to work.  The shipyard's lifeblood, Navy contracts, was drying up, and these old-timers, many of the men were in there 60's, knew that their life's work -- engineering, welding, painting, and so on -- was coming to an end.  (The shipyard was where Brooklyn Ikea is now.  My, how times have changed.)  I wanted to memorialize and honor a beloved world.

This poem came from imagining the kids swimming at the city pool near the projects, one of the great rituals of a New York summer:

Oceanid

 

I just love it in the summer

she says to me.

To get off work, while it’s still light?

You walk by the pool.

The kids are playing.

Brown kids black kids.

A few of them are white.

They glisten like baby seals

in bathing suits.

Screaming Spanish, English

It doesn’t matter

You see them running

boy after boy

boy after girl.

And the girls

they’re getting so bold now

not like when I was that age

we couldn’t go to the pool you know.

Our mothers didn’t want us getting too dark

and besides it would ruin our hair.

Lazy Mira got the beating of her life back then

and she was almost grown.

Mama had paid to have her hair done nice for a wedding

beautifully straightened, you’d a thought she was white.

Mira was that light, but as soon as Mama left

she flew to the pool where Mama saw her,

right here where we’re standing now,

arms full of A&P.

Fast Mira, a pink bikini

running around the edge

pretending to be afraid of Danny B,

who she loved, I don’t have to tell you.

And some little shit of a kid, pulling himself up out of the water

butted his bald head into my sister while she was dancing backwards

and she flipped a horseshoe right into the deep end.

Mira could swim, but it didn’t matter.

She knew she was dead.