Liza Katz Duncan: The Uncles

One served in the navy. Another’s son lived at home,

about my age. One used to watch the birds.

One was a carpenter and built the fence

that ran the length of the beach, ending where land

met water. They’d share a bottle, stare at the bay,

talking tides, the catch, and people they knew.

.

One called me the professor. I never really knew

why. After working late one night I came home,

found him reminiscing. How they’d jump into the bay

as boys, off the old bridge. Half-men, half-birds,

that three-second flicker in midair before landing.

The new bridge: a colossus with a ten-foot suicide fence.

.

(Years later, someone whispered across the fence

that the son my age had died that way.) They knew

the tides like some know train schedules, knew the land

without a map, and by flood stains on the homes

could catalog storms by name. They recognized birds

by their calls, recognized boys who’d drowned in the bay

.

years earlier. It happens, living near the bay

your whole life, said the carpenter, who’d built the fence.

Inevitable, said the one who watched the birds.

They’d seen entire towns subsumed on the news,

the rubble of oceanfront camelots. Seen homes

fray and crumple, seen neighbors head inland,

.

leaving the keys in the door. Their faces creased, hands

calloused from years of fishing in the bay.

This was their home to claim, not mine. Home

to them was a dead end and a guardrail or fence,

then water.

               I’m forgetting others, I know.

One had a scar near his eye in the shape of a bird.

.

One, are fighter, had tattooed the word

mercy, and fed the feral cats. When the land-

lord asked, no one would ever say who.

It doesn’t matter now. When I drive past the bay

I remember, though the scene’s changed: old homes

tilted on their axes. The harbor, dark. The fence,

.

fallen. The people they knew, gone. Even birds

won’t land here. The uncles have moved to retirement homes,

fenced in, built as far as possible from the bay.

Copyright Liza Katz Duncan. From Given (Autumn House, 2023). Winner of the 2022 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize selected by Donika Kelly.

Liza Katz Duncan’s poems have appeared in AGNI, About Place, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Northwest, National Poetry Review and elsewhere. Given is her first poetry collection.