Grandmother, I am here again,
rocking on the half-knitted shawl in your lap.
We could see for miles
along the coast, to the penny arcade
where the neon clown juggled
red balls of light above the roof.

You would kibitz about my future,
then lick the salt on your lips
and take me with you – the light in your eyes
sweeping back to some unfinished history
of a European terminal, the last whistle still blowing.

I know the tracks: how you clawed like dogs
under barbed wire, your father’s flayed skin
already lighting the way. I see every station
sweatered in Yiddish – ancient Aunt Fanny,
young then, married to a mensch, and Uncle Ben,
so anxious to depart he had shpilkes.
All of you, thank G-d, caught trains winding West. 

The steamer into Manhattan and the stogie-hollowed
gray man, young then, who helped you with luggage,
later pumped and showered into you the strain that could reach me.
To all this, in summer salt, on the Maine coast,
bouncing on your lapboard, I listened.

And I learned to ride the train.

Now, as I stand this time alone at the platform, 
I feel the rails going on both before me
and behind. I see you in the slow formal train of Jewish ceremony,
the old men dahvaning you into the cemetery,
calling that I should follow.

And I have remembered this air –
every part of us touched by the great waves.
You said the lighthouse beacon sweeping over us
on shore was a message of the hidden
shoals just off the coast. These memories
sweep the span from your shore to mine –
the lights juggled above the roof
in the arc of remembering.