.jpg?fit=crop&w=220&h=132&auto=format)
At the top of the stairs, spiraled as the core of a nautilus,
safe in the iron light cage, I look down the coast
my grandfather guarded, winter, 1942, pacing the sand
with bayonet, or from the watch tower. He fished eels and crabs
out of the Atlantic, “good eatin’,” and human bodies,
“can’t write much of it.” His letters dwell more on hitchhiking:
“the only way to travel,” and handball: “all the rage, eh what?”
He loved to walk this beach after a Nor’easter to see what washed up—
airplane wings, ship beams, two dozen pillows and a dead-man’s-eye,
which he allowed himself, briefly, to write to his mother, “speak of disaster.”
Deadeyes, he later taught me, on another rockbound coast
are used for rigging, and to tension shrouds of sailing ships.
Made from lignum vitae, “wood of life,” wood so dense it sinks in water,
sometimes called ironwood, holy wood, or bastard greenheart.
