LIGHT ECHOES
In Lindenhurst, New York,
there is a beach
my father enjoys visiting,
whose shoreline is compiled
of botched headstones,
some of which have misspelled names,
as in EFWARD and JOSPEH.
Others have incorrect years of birth
or death, as in 199 or 2203. Most of them
are made of marble, cracked, and some
have seaweed goatees. None of this fails
to make my father laugh, especially when
he has a bad day: almost losing
his balance, misplacing his keys
or confusing me
with my brother
when we have conversations
in person or on the phone,
which seems to happen
with greater frequency at night,
when the sun makes way
for the moon and stars: the big shots,
as he calls them. They know
how to grab
an audience’s attention, he says;
it’s like the tall,
silver-haired host posited
on the program he watched
last week about light echoes
sometimes dust delays when
we see a star’s light,
my father explains,
just like misspelling a name
or carving the wrong year into a headstone
can make it take longer
to represent someone’s existence
accurately. Everything is corrected
in time, John, he says to me,
even beach sand by the waves,
the waves by the moon,
so there’s really no need
to worry about anything,
and what’s not to love about that?
NOTE FOUND IN A RECORD SLEEVE
Dear Dawn,
every time you play this,
sing along with Robert Plant
at the top of your voice:
If you feel you can’t
go on, just believe, and you can’t
go wrong. In the light you will find
the road.
Think about the Christmas of 1975.
Enjoy yourself during the
new year. Love,
your angel
P.S. I hope you have
a record player.
Joey Nicoletti’s latest books are Breakaway (Broadstone Books, 2023) and Extinction Wednesday: A Memoir, which is forthcoming from Bordighera Press in 2024. He is the Reviews Editor of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana and teaches in the College Writing Program at SUNY Buffalo State University.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 