on ruby jacobs walk, a
small girl
asked us for money for ice cream.
she eyed our cones
yours, lemon
mine, strawberry
with a child’s hunger
glinting and opportunistic
as she held out her palm for coins.
i was not yet accustomed to the shapes and sizes,
to a dime being smaller than a nickel,
and in any case wanted to preserve them for souvenirs
so we shook our heads and walked away.
a year later, writing this poem,
i learned that ruby jacobs was a local restauranteur
who, as a boy,
illegally sold ice creams
for a nickel on the boardwalk.
a nickel is the larger coin
the size of a ten pence piece.
i know that now.
the wide atlantic rose from a sloping manicured lawn
star-spangled,
like everything here,
the airborne flag
above a wide pavilion
a fanatic wedding cake topper
against the blood-blue sky.
i slipped
out of my shoes and let
the white sand burn my feet,
and jaggedly fill the spaces between my toes.
the atlantic held open its arms
though we weren’t, as we imagined,
looking east
looking home
but south to new jersey, across the bay.
the gnarled boardwalk was a
song of the twentieth century
a roll-call of mass-market capitalism
here in the city that didn’t invent the concept
but certainly perfected it:
hot dogs
amusements
ice creams (we’ve covered that)
fridge magnets
baseball caps
i bought an espresso cup with a picture of the president
and the caption:
‘huuuuge!’
i stopped to take a photograph
of a space-age building from the fifties
which turned out to be
a public toilet.
later
from the sunbaked d train,
brooklyn spread out beneath us
the houses garnished with flags,
then the city coughed us up on seventh avenue
and night fell five hours early.
20.7.19
