M A R G I E  The American Journal of Poetry     www.margiereview.com

Published Annually in the Fall                                     MARGIE  P. O. BOX 250, CHESTERFIELD, MO 63006-0250

Because she comes here just a few hours a week, you are lucky

     to have found her—

Mrs. Ito, who is 94: you have to bend way down

     and speak loudly in her ear.

To ask for the story she floats on these words: wreckage and sky,

     the wreckage and sky,

when she tells how her house lost its moorings at midnight

     to the shoulders of the surf.

And how because she could not swim she clung to a door

     and rode it until dawn.

April Fool’s Day, 1946:

     the whole seaward part of town destroyed.

So the museum sits now in the lee of the headland

     across from the bus station

where drunks sail to sleep on its wooden benches—

     the sun outside has fried their hearts.

Wreckage and sky, the turmoil and the clarity:

     timbers lobbed by the wave-crest

versus the constant stars.  Or the wild hair of the drunks

     versus the bright and placid bay.

For sixty years she has sailed on the door

     of her story, and now she is sorry

she cannot tell it well enough--she went to work

     in the hotdog plant some years

before the wave.  Yes,

     there were others who survived,

but they were children, so they were quick,

     outsprinting the surf—

they did not spend the night

     all stretched out on the sea.

Which was a deeper black than you could ever imagine,

     though what she says is:

 All my friends are dead—

     not the wreckage, just the clarity

when you get to be so very old--or in the hospital

     with no brains left.

Only me, she says:

     she’s the only one who was saved.

And then she holds up her finger, for you

     to throw your life-ring on.

LUCIA PERILLO has published two previous collections: The Body Mutinies, for which she won the PEN/Revson Foundation Poetry Fellowship and several other awards, and Dangerous Life, which received the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America.  Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and The Kenyon Review, and have been included in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies.  A former park ranger, she now teaches at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.  Her newest book of poems, Luck Is Luck, won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Prize.