When I return home, Mother's letter arrives
with the black and white picture
shed taken of us in 1953
at the beach in Monterey.

My father wears swim trunks,
has thick dark wavy hair,
muscles that move with the waves.

He can hold all four of us
in the circle of his arms.

Is this the way we would have looked
on a rockaway beach of the Mediterranean
if our grandparents had stayed in Italy?

Windswept, with tan lines, t-shirts off,
scrim of salt on our shoulders,
winter skin sunburned, lips peeling.

The four of us naked, underwater,
swimming like otters, mermaids, eels.

Our mothers, poised like goddesses,
prisms in their hair.

Our grandparents, olive,
behind Old World lapels.

When did I rinse the salt and sand away,
still sticky on my neck,
like the cormorant behind us on the pier
drying its wings?

Only now I can see how my father tried
to gather us within the frame
to keep the waves from knocking us down,
to make the blue of the world possible.

- Denise Calvetti Michaels