Summer City

Creamed coffee in a small honey jar,
the label still showing the beekeeper
bending gently among the swarms and
honeycombs
Two Ravens talking to a magpie
high in a cottonwood pale green
leaves jiggling among them like
regalia against a powder blue
late summer sky
The Magpie warbles like an infant
reminding me of beaches with
gray wet sand and bubbles
terrycloth bathing suits with
blue and white stripes
A tan father, unafraid of the deeps,
smelling of Coppertone #4
and almond sweat
Little sandpipers skittering along
the surf and big bosomed aunts
in magenta and purple bikinis
strolling like marchers with
elbows flung out for each step
Metallic skyscrapers in the last
sun of summer, looming over
the river, the silvered lattice
girders of the 59th Street Bridge
Sand falling out of hair and tickling
crotch, we hurtle into Manhattan,
a beachy, moppy haired family of
browns, sitting quietly hungry for
Italian food
The City is quiet, the train tracks empty,
the streets softer than I remember
hot dogs tingle the air, knishes
with mustard, soft pretzels smiling
in the steam.
Movie theaters hawk the titles of the early 70s
sad men on billboards in cowboy hats
Chinese men smiling, on black bicycles,
dark flattened gum on the sidewalks.
And still the ocean echoes in my ears
like a conch shell, the tide of me
moving in and out,
Nobody talking, and for once,
that is ok, that is what the beach
and Manhattan do to us.
My mother sees a friend on 32nd street
it seems odd, breaks the spell, but
as the two ladies, both dressed in saffron sundresses,
converse, faces close, I cling to my father's hip
and smell the day, my life.