She would have remembered today’s blue sky
from summers at the Vineyard Sailing Camp
where she learned about tacking and heeling
and coming about on the calm or choppy
waters of the Lagoon, all the techniques
necessary to survive vagaries
of wind and waves, the weather of the world.

Separated by some twenty years,
we never met, yet shared a Cold War country,
a moral and philosophical outrage
against the McCarthy era, the bomb,
the subtle strictures on what girls could learn,
all the while loving the romantic lure
of berets and cafés and New Wave films.

Loving, too, the wind in our hair, the flight
of our bikes along the East Chop bluffs,
the sun above and Vineyard Sound below,
like sea birds whose wings were our strong legs,
fearless for that one moment of flying
under the sky a blue she would have known
and where we both were, maybe, most at home.