I
We learned that we were dinosaur wasteland
until a great glacier glide sculpted a fish-
shaped pile of sand into six hundred
thousand acres of fertile island prairie;
this was the beginning. We belonged to the earth.
We learned that the Algonquin way faded onto maps.
Massapequa, Shinnecock, Mattituck are only towns. We learned
how the people disappeared; they were pushed off their land.
No one ever told us they are still alive in the diaspora. Or
that just beyond the old Mitchell Field airplane hangars, behind
Roosevelt Field’s massive monolith mall and its scorching
cracked concrete parking lot bursting with dandelion weeds,
eighteen acres of original prairie remain.
No one ever told us that we still belong to the earth.
II
With a burst of white flight, they fled
from their Brooklyn brownstone to the LIE,
the Long Island Expressway, the longest
lie they would ever tell their children:
that they moved to Fish Island for a bigger yard,
for trees, for the quiet delights of the country, for
a better way of life that only comes
from leaving the city.
III
We live in a white brick Cape Cod house
perfectly planted atop a mound of crabgrass
on a maple tree lined street of identical
houses and trees and mounds and facades;
cemetery streets named for English flora, medieval
palaces and all the other souvenirs of British colonization.
Hampton, Kensington, Whitehall: the streets
that should connect Hempstead to Garden
City, swiftly split into dead-
ends and cul-de-sacs. We live there,
in the in-between,
in Garden City South.
From my window I can see
the green top of the waterslide of the
Garden City pool; we are not allowed inside.
We shop at Reality Fashions of Hempstead,
where every item is ten dollars; we don’t
tell anyone, but everybody knows.
In Reality I met my first black friend
wearing a blue Met’s jacket; I asked:
Mommy, is he blue?
And she whispered:
he’s black, we don’t say that word aloud.
In summertime we walk across crumbled concrete
while sprinklers spit in spastic spurts
and fast cars blow through each corner stop.
Barricaded by the Southern State,
Meadowbrook, Cross-Island and Northern
State parkways; we cannot see the ocean from here.
Point Lookout Beach is twenty minutes by car, but
mother is afraid of changing lanes, of merging;
she only makes right-hand turns; we sit
many days on blacktop tar beaches
listening to the roar of cars on the parkway,
our ocean waves. On special occasions
two hours and three bus transfers
will bring us to Point Lookout Beach
where every fifty years, the horizon
is two feet closer and I realize
that one day the entire life I know
will disappear, strand by strand,
into rising ocean tide.
