The Day Before Thanksgiving in Red Bank, New Jersey

My father’s dreams were
born and raised on Coney Island.
I see them from an overlook
atop the bluffs of Sandy Hook,
the familiar mix of forest, farmland and
billowing power plant at my back.
Brooklyn is tiny and fogged, delicate
from a distance, but New Jersey
knows everything
through gray-tinted lenses.

Nineteen Rosemary Drive
is a tan clapboard house
with two sets of stairs leading to
two different doors leading to
where my mother ate and slept until
the beckoning of exotic Navesink River Road
became too tempting to ignore any longer.
My grandmother sleeps in the bed
next to me, a little less nostalgic
and probably remembering lightly
how hard it was to leave here
for a sunnier kind of run-down town.

My mother gets lost on a country road
and wonders aloud when
trees began outnumbering street signs
in Monmouth County.
About a mile down, after some railroad tracks
and more blank Autumn,
ten deer stir next to the road,
a sign with an arrow pointing West
and a slight and peeling RED BANK, 2 MILES
just beyond them
in startling green.