Waterborne

Summer days buoyant on the Sound,

I went to bed lightheaded with the waves’

gentle roughhousing, dreams

of an underwater life washing over me

as I held tight to sleep’s gritty shore,

the shipwrecked girl, urban

mermaid, rising each azure day

like Botticelli’s pearl, new

to land and its peculiar longings.

Salt dried to tiny coastlines on my skin.

The moon tugged.

This was long before I knew its ties

on me, before I understood

even islands have a history, moored as they are

to their dark subterranean dramas.

I thought my island solitary, sovereign,

one mile long, half as wide, floating

free of the others, the self-willed exile

ruled by steely necessity

& singular immigrant desire.

There was no mainland,

no single link that could repair

rifts so deeply cut.

Old animosities—water, stone—the slow

erosion of lands long drifting

apart. Never mind the throb

of phantom oneness, that longing

to connect. And so the glory

of bridges, tunnels fisting their way

through rock.

To the west, across the Bay, Manhattan glittered,

monolithic, certain as a promise & as easily

withheld.

Half-mile east, Hart Island,

whose name I heard as heart,

thinking its shape aortic, muscular,

what I knew of it whispered

in muted tones of late-night

kitchen conversation, a few sketchy details

overheard,

nurtured, mutating—

convicts, suicides, nameless thus unloved,

ferried to the other side,

wooden coffins splitting

open, the ghost-story voice of a boy

who told me that sometimes their bones were found

on the beach, sometimes drawn back

by the tides into the Sound where they drifted, seeking

some living thing.

Memory is a crude map

of faulty correspondences, its boundaries

remade by serendipity, as when

by chance, years later and far

from that place, I came upon

an article about those islands

in an airport lounge,

the false clarity of black & white

smoothed over with the gloss

of human interest—

Chatty, indiscreet, it went on

for pages:

three thousand bodies

each year pulled from dumpsters, vacant lots,

tunnels, tracks,

though most are waterborne,

the forensic expert quoted as saying,

After all, New York is a city of fourteen islands.

How they’re loaded onto city-owned trucks

for a bumpy journey through the boroughs,

their final stop a scar

of land in a corner of the Bronx,

then ferried to the Potter’s Field

across the bay: Hart Island—

an asylum once, later a prison,

public graves at the northern end

where inmates from a Riker’s Island cellblock

lower them down

into ten-foot trenches.

It was like finally learning the truth

about a loved one you lost touch with long ago, now

long dead, the one whose odd habits

everyone suspected a sign of something

darker, who swam alone

at family picnics, always alone and out

too far, while you hugged the shore, wanting

to follow except that even then you knew

the dangers, how suddenly the current

could change,

and the surface: one moment holding

your reflection, the next turning,

jewel-blue to brown, black

with each cloud passing.

--Joanne Tangorra

First published in The South Dakota Review, Fall 2002