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At the Beach

By Elizabeth Alexander b. 1962 Elizabeth Alexander

Looking at the photograph is somehow not

unbearable: My friends, two dead, one low

on T-cells, his white T-shirt an X-ray

screen for the virus, which I imagine

as a single, swimming paisley, a sardine

with serrated fins and a neon spine.

I’m on a train, thinking about my friends

and watching two women talk in sign language.

I feel the energy and heft their talk

generates, the weight of their words in the air

the same heft as your presence in this picture,

boys, the volume of late summer air at the beach.

Did you tea-dance that day? Write poems

in the sunlight? Vamp with strangers? There is

sun under your skin like the gold Sula

found beneath Ajax’s black. I calibrate

the weight of your beautiful bones, the weight

of your elbow, Melvin,

on Darrell’s brown shoulder.

“At the Beach” by Elizabeth Alexander. From Body of Life, published by Tia Chucha Press. Copyright 1996 Elizabeth Alexander. Used by permission of the author.

Source: Poetry (February 1994).

Biography

Elizabeth Alexander was born in Harlem, New York, but grew up in Washington, DC, the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairman, Clifford Alexander Jr. She holds degrees from Yale, Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her PhD. Currently the chair of African American Studies at Yale, Alexander is a highly respected teacher and . . .

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