Unknown, Grave #2
You, Unknown, are my special spreadsheet connection.
Nameless and sexless, I know two things about you
that I will never know about myself:
the date and the place of your death.
Seven years younger than I am today
you fell to the boardwalk planks and did not rise.
A stroke? A gunshot? An overdose?
The record book does not say.
Just a date without a time, a place without a reason.
Google tells me it was a Sunday, the weather
was fine. Nothing more No paragraph about you
in the Daily News on 4/26/98.
I see a wrinkled jacket, denim legs
surrounded by a knot of blue police.
A silent ambulance rolling carefully
up the pedestrian ramp. I see medics
and a big zippered bag. Was it afternoon,
with all the chubby Russian sunbathers
watching them lift you into the white truck?
Were you a chubby Russian sunbather?
A long-muscled handball champion from the Brighton
Beach Courts? Flacco with a pocket full of magic dust?
Unknown, my young self walked that boardwalk
at least a thousand times. I didn’t always carry ID.
I wasn’t usually sober. Some nights
I slept beside a stranger on the bottlecap-dotted sand
or swam alone at midnight, my clothes
a tiny pile far behind me on the beach,
the blinking red light of the Parachute
my only guide. I always made it back.
I took it for granted that I always would.
Jackie Sheeler
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT_xOtaDMPY&feature=related