Ocean Beach by Ted Guhl
 
In 1943 it was a sailor's world.
My mother, with Jane Russell hair
and bright lipstick lips, stood
by the edge of the ocean, bare
 
footed and young. Taffy, twisted by the hand
of the candy maker, grew soft in my mouth.
Excited voices from the arcade drifted
Across the boardwalk to the south
 
beach as sandy-legged young women
in one-piece bathing suits
flirted with sailors in bell-bottoms.
My father, wearing dress whites,
 
dolphins above his pocket
and hat tilted upon his cocky head,
placed his hand upon my shoulder.
Shells, like fragments of skull from the sea-bed
 
mingled with seaweed at the tideline.
Beach plums grew ripe by the ferriswheel,
sweet and purple and within arm-reach;
free fruit for a laughing child
 
who rode the miniature railroad.
Or, for five cents, he peered through
binoculars across the harbor at
a lighthouse standing out from the blue
 
water like a toy tower,
or at a diesel submarine afloat
upon the ocean's belly
for his wide-eyed delight.
 
Later, on the boardwalk,
mother (smile and long legs) ambled; her bare
arm hooked through father©ˆs
white cotton sleeve. There
 
hundreds of sailors, in crews or with women,
sat at the tables of the Gam lounge or strolled
along the boardwalk.
While others, away on patrol,
 
innocently played cribbage and sank ships,
sang songs of the sea,
in both oceans,
in 1943.
 
II.
 
By September of 1944
the sand had grown cold and memory
had a taste as sharp as sea water.
Before bed, evening after evening,
 
I sat on the floor of my father's closet
smelling his dress uniforms,
perfumed with diesel fuel from the
submarine he had gone away in.
 
Waiting for a dependent's check or for "word",
the corner of my mother's eyes grew pinched.
When he finally came home he was quiet.
That summer, we went to Ocean Beach only once.
 
III.
 
As a young man, passing this beach
after so many years, my child-time
gathered like seaweed and shell
at the tideline.
 
And, though my crisp uniform lacked
the odor of a diesel engine,
I swaggered a bit in the wide-bottomed pants
(picturing the boardwalk and women)
 
as I crossed the gangplank of the USS Ethan Allen.
It would carry me almost without sound
into this same ocean by this same beach
from its base on the Thames.
 
We had no war to fight but did a deed
as would make manly Ulysses cry:
our sleek missile, named for a star,
rose from the sea and fell across the sky
 
to stop with a white flash upon another beach,
so far away from New London harbor,
upon a South Pacific island,
in 1964.
 
IV.
 
At Ocean Beach, on this day,
the sand seems clean and fine,
the ocean fresh with salt,
the harbor unchanged by time.
 
My back against the boardwalk,
I remember that distant island,
and vow I will no longer believe
in the myth of the sailorman.
 
And these old eyes squint at a submarine
making its evening run
towards its mooring up the Thames,
in October of 1991.