Rocky Point: First Love by Christine Gelineau (ONE GOOD MEMORY Series)

Rocky Point: First Love
by Christine Gelineau

Seen from the Rocky Point Ferris wheel at night,
Narragansett Bay has a trompe-l’oeil serenity.
I was just fourteen, dizzy with the height
and with being there with Dan. The far
bay’s look of calm helped to steady the woozy
feel it gave me to be aloft in air, casually
suspended high above the dirty pavement.

The memory I hold is slow motion and exact;
cradled together in the narrow car, his arm sweetly
settled on my shoulder as we rise by stages
from the others we have come with. We wheel
steadily to the zenith and rock there together
in the sea-salt, light-jeweled summer dark,
and never does the wheel descend.

Photo by Gleb Pestrikov. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Through nearly the entire 20th century, Rocky Point was an amusement park on the shores of Narragansett Bay in Warwick, Rhode Island. I have a number of childhood memories associated with Rocky Point and its cavernous Shore Dinner Hall with their famous chowder and clam cakes. My favorite memory of the park is from the summer I turned 14 when a group of us counselors and CITs (counselors-in-training) from Ok-wa-nessett Camp went to the park in the evening, feeling grown up and free to be roaming the park unsupervised by parents. It is my memory of first love, with a young man whose name was indeed Dan, though I never called him that or heard him called that, since his nickname was in universal usage among our group. This poem is included in my collection Remorseless Loyalty from Ashland Poetry Press.

IMAGE: The Ferris Wheel, Rocky Point, Rhode Island (1912 postcard published by S. L. & Co.).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Christine Gelineau is the author of three full-length books of poetry: Crave from NYQ Books; the book-length sequence Appetite for the Divine, published as the Editor’s Choice for the Robert McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press and Remorseless Loyalty winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, also from Ashland Poetry Press.  A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Gelineau’s poetry and essays have been widely published in journals and online in venues such as Verse Daily and Rattle. She teaches in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She retired from Binghamton University, where she taught for 26 years. Visit her at christinegelineau.com.