i.
I inherited an urge to flee
to the island he could never leave,
a thighbone stretch of land
surrounded by undrinkable water
tourists still trespass over by boat
to visit; it was his business
to bring them there, to transport lovers
over sea.

My mother traveled there alone
to escape a Brooklyn summer.
A month later she married him
in a wedding dress bought
at the best hotel’s tennis shop.
A steamer trunk arrived
from her mother
filled with linens.
When they unpacked it, money flew
from the folds of starched white sheets—
belated confetti.

ii.
After my father died above her porch
in a hammock strung up between two trees,
his lover wrote to say
I am very Asian about promises.
She enclosed his obituary
but had not mentioned me.
A year later she wrote again,
said the wall of books he willed me
had been waterlogged
in a hurricane.
Le tropique tristes, she sighed:
the sad tropics.

iii.
I have the dozen letters written
after eighteen years.
In the first he told
how time passed more slowly there,
that the heat made even
the town’s clock stutter—
enclosed a clip
about a postal truck
found abandoned by the sea,
stuffed with a decade’s worth
of undelivered love letters.

iv.
On the hottest days of summer
I go to the convenience store
on the corner where I buy
bad beer I drink like water
in the coolness of my apartment,
which smells of vinegar
and chamomile.
I am visited there
by my lover, a man who puzzles
my hair but does not kiss me.

At noon the train runs
through town
and everything rattles
a little bit.