The Undertow
On our way to the sea we boys were told
Watch out for the undertoe. That’s how
I heard it, anyway. Even inland,
Standing on the cool tile floor of the house
In Florida my grandparents owned (true
To the stereotype of the snowbird Jews
Who fled cold Ohio every winter),
I could feel it slipping under my feet.
This before the financial crisis of oh eight,
Which took everything, forcing them to settle
For the upper-middle class fate
Of a long-term rental. And under it all,
The undertoe, which I didn’t know then
Is spelled undertow. We were told again,
Just as it was coming into our hearing,
To beware of it, beware being
A faster way of saying be aware.
“It will take you before you know it,”
They said, and they meant it literally.
Before you know you’re being taken
You’re being taken. Not something you can
Really watch out for, is it, more feel
As a slight instability underfoot,
Or, more specifically, under toe, the very
Faintest feathery trickling tickle
Of a loss so gradual you don’t notice
It before you’re being swept out in its arms,
A sudden vanishing of everything
You thought you were so safely standing on.
They didn’t tell us all this, of course,
But this was what they meant, our grandparents
Who, decades later, would die within
Two weeks of one another, my grandmother’s
Death the undertow that took him, though
He was expecting it, maybe even asking it to.
A few of us who went to her funeral
Didn’t even go to his, as if
We’d watched them being buried together.
One winter it did take one of us,
The undertow, that is, the youngest, as is
Always the case in the stories, which proved
Everything they’d been telling us was true,
Though to be fair it wasn’t my brother’s fault.
Alone with us, our grandfather was the one
Who was supposed to be watching for it,
And this before phones, even, probably
He was distracted by the dumb beauty
(dumb as in silent) of the light on the water,
Not even sunset yet, just the flinty
Late afternoon sun, thinking how all that
He had worked so hard for he had
And had need of nothing more, which is when
Of course you lose it all, all here being
Your daughter’s third son, and find yourself
Running into the ocean in khakis
And a striped polo shirt and screaming
Grab him up out of the waves, the boy the sea
Was trying to take, and come walking
Up the steep beach sobbing, choking on joy,
The undertow nibbling at your feet.
