| Far Rockaway by Susan Aizenberg | ||
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Look: a man is teaching his children to ride the big waves. Hand in hand in hand they wade out past the first mild breakers. Icy green fingers tap the childrens' thin chests. Rising on their toes, they inch forward, through the sea's startling gradations: blue green, bottle green, ink pad blue, violet — until, peering down, they see only the plunging dark. Sea lettuce and jelly fish swirl past them. Sun jewels the far surfaces, where a trawler chugs, placid as a Great Blue, along the horizon. Cormorants and gulls carve their elegant wheelies in the bleached August sky, their shrieks another thread in the day's tapestry of sounds: the insect drone of a Piper Cub trailing its banner, Noxema Cools Skin Burn, overhead, the tide's iambic susurrus. Now, somewhere deep, past the quivering red buoys, the vast machine that runs the ocean cranks up, and it's as if the girl can hear the rusty gears, the ferrous clank of metal, as the first line gathers and rolls toward them, the waves rising, immense and black, swells laced with churning froth, as the sea shifts its great weight, slowly, at first, and then bursts towards shore, the three small figures watching. The man laughs, and the children laugh, with pleasure and fear. For years the girl will dream of this wild coast, a single wave screening the sky, a tsunami, swollen with intent, that chases her upshore, crashing through the seawall so she must run, breathless, for home, the fierce water relentless behind her as some furious ghost, her name etched in salt graffitying dank alley walls. But now she waits, letting it come, as her father's taught her, her lips bluing, goosepimples roughening her skin, seasoaked until she feels as if she might be turning back through history, that chilled enough, they might sprout gills and fins, devolve to the watery start. The enormous wave looms, suspended like held breath, above them, and they dive low, into its dark curl, trusting the surge to pass over them, that they will surface to calm, the ocean rocking gently now, spent wash foaming its delicate palimpsest along the shore. for Edward Singer
SUSAN AIZENBERG'S first collection of poems, PERU, appeared in 1997 in the second volume of Graywolf Press's TAKE 3: AGNI NEW POETS SERIES. Recent and forthcoming poems have appeared in many journals, including CHELSEA, THE JOURNAL, PRAIRIE SCHOONER, THIRD COAST, AGNI, PRAGUE REVIEW, CONNECTICUT REVIEW, and THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER. Susan Aizenberg is co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of THE EXTRAORDINARY TIDE: NEW POETRY BY AMERICAN WOMEN, an anthology forthcoming from Columbia University Press in January 2001. Currently she lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where she is Poetry Editor of THE NEBRASKA REVIEW and teaches part-time in the Writer's Workshop at University Nebraska/Omaha and at Creighton University. |
