This one is about the way we went to the beach.
And I considered it very foolish.
There was a bridge that had been burned and obviously repaired,
but I was very young.
All I could see was [? refracted ?] on [INAUDIBLE],
and I could see the burned part of that.
Sister was wedged beside the wicker basket.
Slats of hot midsummer striped her dress, speckled dust
in shifting sun and shadow.
The trolley lurched to leeward, seemed to press our bodies
backward in a flowered meadow.
Tossed mama's brown hair sculptured in a puff.
Father rose and reeling from our side
interviewed the trenchant motorman.
How rough the whitecaps glittered beyond the marsh.
Our pulses leaped at the stench of kelp
and the harsh screams of the cormorant
skimming the trolley warp wire.
Halfway on the clanging headlong ride,
the trolley crossed a bridge, charred black from fire.
And reason impaled me even through mama's smile
and the arc of the motorman's tobacco juice.
There, there, soothed mama.
The deuce, said father.
But knowing better, I cried.
Though we went on for mile after summer mile
and arrived as we always did at the rank seaside,
all that held me up seemed wholly mad.
Not even the hidden drop off or a bloated death
in the luminous choppy water diverted my sad foreboding
or the derelict lighthouse in whose shade we lunched.
At sunset, sister slept like a rosy anchor
fastening parents to bench.
And while they bunched, the tide rolled softly landward
like her breath.
While I sat listening, wretched without rancor,
submissive on the bench beside the track.
Knowing this time the burned bridge would break,
I clearly saw my parents committed to folly.
Mama, for all her airs could but clean and bake.
Now father as in a nightmare would take us back.
And hooting around the bend came the feckless trolley.