SANDBAR AT SNIPES KEY
Before the divorce, we used to picnic
on the first Sunday of each month, even in winter.
My father would belly his pontoon on the sandbar,
then my extended family swung single file
down the ladder wearing sneakers--
it was too shallow for swimming
and not all sand, but coral heads and bottles,
long-spined sea urchins, perhaps sting rays.
Arm in arm we made a chain from the boat
to shore, in flowered or fluorescent bathing suits,
like a long swatch of milky bufo eggs
to stake our claim on that small tongue of sand.
My father would carve a pit in the beach,
make fire with mangrove limbs,
spear a hog fish and roast it before it was dead,
squeezed lime hissing the fire down.
Then he'd stretch out on the sand, his arms folded
under his head like a sky-watcher.
His snore was like wave-crash. Giggling,
I poured bucketsful of sand over him.
Mixed with saltwater, it was cement.
Then I built a series of castles around him.
He'd sleep like that, pretending not to know
I was there, or was he pretending?
During one of these Sundays, our engine
broke down. And to get us home he jumped in,
pulled the pontoon by the anchor rope over his shoulder,
trudged the three bay miles to our dock.
His hands and back blistered.
That night, he stood out on the back deck
and my mother poured a bottle of peroxide over him
which fizzed like sea foam over his body.
He saw me see him wince, then exaggerated
his wincing with cartoonish eeks and acks.
He let me wind his palms with gauze.
I fell asleep with my head on his scorched chest
despite the rifle-cracks of some John Wayne movie,
both of us in his cigar-burned, soft gray La-Z-boy.
He was fond of saying, Man is greater than any misery.
Out there on the sandbar, it was easy to forget
about my parents' last fight, the smack of his truck door.
It felt good just to dig my hands in
the muck by the shoreline, to try and bury
my father so deep in the earth he'd never leave.