I do not remember much of my hometown’s history, taught to me in the seventh grade 

by a tall, young teacher the girl sitting next to me had a crush on, a girl whose name

 

I cannot remember, although I can see his shiny white shoes, feet as big as cake boxes,

and the matching belt he wore as if I was looking at them now.

 

We had come to that junior high from the town’s elementary schools: Bayview, Captree,

Higbie, Manetuck, Paumanok, Oquenock, Secatogue, and Westbrook.

 

All year we learned about Salt Box Houses, Walt Whitman, whaling, vineyards,

and the indigenous Secatogues. Farmers, fishers, clammers, they’d lived 

 

in long plank houses with a name I’ve since forgotten. But the word Secatogue

I remember, and I recall the way it rolled off our tongues  for months; we Irish, Jewish, 

 

Italian, Puerto Rican kids had been weaned on such words, the language of the places

we knew. We rode on Montauk Highway, visited Lake Ronkonkoma, 

 

shopped at Massapequa Mall, and would later have our prom at the Naragansett Inn. 

We never paused at Quogue, Commack, Islip, and Amagansett, or stumbled over 

 

their stresses. It was a language that tied us all together, a language long dead

but still alive to us, kids with no other ties to those whose land was ours.

 

Just three years later in high school, our history lessons turned global, 

but our small town news stayed local. We were shocked to hear that the wife

 

of the teacher with the white shoes had died. The dead had only come to us 

before in textbooks, drawings or grainy photographs, names memorized for tests

 

and then forgotten. We were shocked that death could come so close, as shocked 

as the Secatogues, looking up from theirs hoes, their nets, and their traps

 

to see strange white faces speaking words that sounded like gibberish,

not understanding until they were surrounded, and death was all around them.