It is almost polio season.  The girls

From the cigarette factories in Massachusetts

Are still visiting the northern beaches.

At midnight, the milky rubbers

In the breakers are like a familiar invasion

Of sea life.

Sitting on the rocks we watch a runner:

Weight shifter, some tick, tick,

Almost of intelligence—

The bone catching of balance . . .

From behind a red haired girl appears—

Missing a thumb on her left hand,

Breathless, she asks for a light:

A crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes

At the top of a nylon stocking;

The other leg bare, her abdomen

And breasts plastered with white sand.

Drunk, she says, “He just swam out

Past the jetty—that was twenty minutes

Ago.  You think I give a damn.”

We lit the cigarette for her. Her hands

Shaking.

No moon, it took an hour

To find all her clothing,

Dropped as they ran

Down the rock shelf through the dunes . . .

He hadn’t drowned.  He swam around the jetty,

Crawled to the grasses and over the granite shelf.

Gathering his clothes, he left

Her there as a joke.

Her hair was colored

That second chaste coat of red on the pomegranate.

We were eating sandwiches on the rocks.

She frightened my mother and me. My little

Sister just thought she was funny.

In thirty years I have dreamt of her twice, once

With fear and once without.  I’ve written

This for her, and because

Twice is too often

Considering how beautiful she was.