☀ What Sparks Poetry: Liza Katz Duncan on "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-man, half-bird,
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, a firefighter, 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.