Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

I Was Born Coming to the Sea

• 5 i was born coming to the Sea I was born in Seaside Hospital on a Long Beach. The buoy I heard calling from the sea was a boy calling me a year to the day they left Ducktown, Tennessee. While I was coming, Daddy rode the rails to catch the wheat harvest in Washington, Mama waitressed the last road west, a Japanese café at the end of Redondo Beach pier. We rode the Midnight Ghost, Daddy and I gone north for some money, while Mama and I at the sunset end of the world brought food from across the sea. Mama walked all day the hilly streets above the long sea the day I was born, the new city risen from the earthquake of ’38. The buoy I heard calling was a sailor who cried from Japanese war, don’t bring a child into this world, everyone told them. But they laughed. Mama was an orphan. I felt her hold me as her mother had held her through the orphanage walls. All my life I’ve heard them laughing in the dark, the sea lapping at the doors, the gulls flapping in the windows, the boy calling through the storm. Thanksgivings we were too poor for turkey. I pointed to a seagull, said my first sentence. That’s okay, Mama, Daddy can shoot an ea-gull. When the ships came in from war, Friday nights, payday when there was work, we went down to the Pike, ate shrimp from Shrimpy Joe’s, so cheap we bought bagfuls. We watched the boys come home to neon, to toothless, grinning, red-lipped women who tattooed Mother on their chests. • 6 Then we drove out the shaky night docks of Terminal Island, sat on the foggy edge beneath groaning oil wells and the dark squeaky hulls of returned battleships. They told me the sound was a boy out there telling boats how to come in through the fog. I listened to the waves slapping him around. I heard his crying, his lonely orphanage in the sea. When we fished, I cast my line to him, I was coming to the sea when I was born, the buoy I heard through water and storm was a boy calling me. ...