Island Logic

i.
I inherited an urge to flee
to the island he could never leave,
a thighbone stretch of land
surrounded by undrinkable water
tourists still trespass over by boat
to visit; it was his business
to bring them there, to transport lovers
over sea.

My mother traveled there alone
to escape a Brooklyn summer.
A month later she married him
in a wedding dress bought
at the best hotel’s tennis shop.
A steamer trunk arrived
from her mother
filled with linens.
When they unpacked it, money flew
from the folds of starched white sheets — 
belated confetti.

ii.
After my father died above her porch
in a hammock strung up between two trees,
his lover wrote to say
I am very Asian about promises.
She enclosed his obituary
but had not mentioned me.
A year later she wrote again,
said the wall of books he willed me
had been waterlogged
in a hurricane.
Le tropique tristes, she sighed:
the sad tropics.

iii.
I have the dozen letters written
after eighteen years.
In the first he told
how time passed more slowly there,
that the heat made even
the town’s clock stutter — 
enclosed a clip
about a postal truck
found abandoned by the sea,
stuffed with a decade’s worth
of undelivered love letters.

iv.
On the hottest days of summer
I go to the convenience store
on the corner where I buy
bad beer I drink like water
in the coolness of my apartment,
which smells of vinegar
and chamomile.
I am visited there
by my lover, a man who puzzles
my hair but does not kiss me.

At noon the train runs
through town
and everything rattles
a little bit.