of sky, its fading echo among the oaks and poplars swallowed first by a jet banking west then the Erie-Lackawanna sounding its horn as it comes through the tunnel through the cliffs to the river and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff, full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt.
You can hear it in the dark
from beyond what was once the amusement park. And the wind carries along as well, from down by the river, when the tide’s just so, the drainage just so, the chemical ghost of old factories, the rotted piers and warehouses: lye, pigfat, copra from Lever Bros., formaldehyde from the coffee plant, dyes, unimaginable solvents— a soup of polymers, oxides, tailings fifty years old seeping through the mud, the aroma almost comforting by now, like food, wafting into my childhood room with its fevers and dreams. My old parents asleep, only a few yards across the hall, door open—lest I cry? I remember almost nothing of my life