Poetry by Barbara Helfgott Hyett

The Inlet

Here again, the rough-cut jetty, the ridge
worn flat by men trolling bass and bluefish
and boys with plastic buckets full of porgies.
The hooks are taut in their mouths.
I comb the crevices for mussels, find
a baby flounder, stiff and gray, a shell.
Right side down a huge crab bakes on a rock.

Behind me, vacant, boarded up, the tenements
where I was born. Beige bricks, three or four stories
crammed with families, fathers who delivered milk
or sold potato chips from tall tin cans -
I scooped them into brown bags, watched the oil seep through.

In summer, mothers gave up unemployment
to work in tourist places hawking beach chairs,
vegematics, tickets to Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Mothers didn't swim. They sent us to stay
at the lifeguard stand with a quarter for lunch.
We'd swim past the jetty to the rotted pilings, then back
to the shallows and the puckered seaweed. I'd open my eyes
underwater, watch the silversides skimming my cheek.
When my towel underneath the boardwalk was all in shadow
and the sand had turned quartz cold, I went home.

At Zwiebacks, after dinner, I'd read comic books
or else I'd buy one used. Later, at Altman Field
the boys from Philly who stayed at the guest house
would start to shoot some baskets.
Sometimes I'd just sit on the bleachers
licking salt from the back of my hand.
Everything was like that then: crisp, expectable,
a silent movie, the ocean and the hoop disappearing
gradually from the end of the playground
until I couldn't see the ball anymore.

In my bed, I'd watch the sway of the clotheslines
on the rooftop outside my window and listen
to the men playing pinochle at the dining-room table,
the stogie smoke gray and small-winged down the hall.
The women swept the floors, laid roach traps,
ate chocolate at the mahjongg game downstairs.
They'd laugh, and clack the bone faced tiles,
a sound of summer when summer wasn't time
but place, ordinary as the low cry of a loon
diving at night, the voice of a beach block,
its muggy rhythm, the click of the tide
just before it turns.

Barbara Helfgott Hyett