Copyright © 2018 by Sean Thomas Dougherty
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ISBN: 978-1-942683-55-1
eISBN: 978-1-942683-56-8
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Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 72 for special individual acknowledgments.
Cover Design: Sandy Knight
Cover Art: “Motel Peninsula” by Greg Valiga
Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dougherty, Sean Thomas, author.
Title: The second O of sorrow / Sean Thomas Dougherty.
Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., [2018] | Series: American reader series ; no. 165
Identifiers: LCCN 2017045511 | ISBN 9781942683551 (softcover : acid-free paper)
Classification: LCC PS3554.O8213 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045511
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Why Bother?
The Second O of Sorrow
What Do You Say to a Daughter When She Suspects Her Mother Is Dying
My Grief Grows a White Flower
After Surgery
In the Light of One Lamp
The Bravery of Birds
Scribbled on the Scaffolding of
We a New Ledger
Poem Written with a Cough
We Pay the Rent We Breathe
Grief
Triptych of Desire and the Duende
Red Dirt
In the Absence of Others I Wanted Something Brave
Tamir Rice
Tattoos
Parade Street
Youngstown Monologue: Captured Light Stained Glass
You’re Good at Going Under
Far from Any Classroom
Karaoke Night at the Y Not Bar, Carnegie, PA
Pittsburgh
Psalm of the Working Poor
Toledo, Ohio 1977
In the Midnight Waking
Leaking Light
My Youngest Daughter Brings Me Daisies and Bits of Plastic Trash
Biography of LeBron as Ohio
Poem Made of East Sides
Elegy on the Side of a Milk Carton
Eating Sea Roses in the Afterlife
Down the Line
Our Love as Lead Belly or
You Are Beautiful as the Absence of the Air
Rain, Gas, Boone County, West Virginia
Gertrude Stein Lighthouse Sonnet
DJ Jehovah
Something Lovely as the Rain
Grief ’s Familiar Rooms
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Colophon
The Second O of Sorrow
“Forgive me if this seems
extreme—I don’t know how to make things
ordinary anymore, though I dress and go to work
each day as if the world were ordinary . . .”
—Susan Aizenberg
“What keeps us awake,
other than the clock’s sweeping hand
moving like a slow-cresting wave,
is the sound of no sound, the sound
of drifting, of grieving, of not letting go,
of trying to find a name for this.”
—January Gill O’Neil
“Apollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio.”
—Hart Crane
“I’ll love you like I love you
Then I’ll die”
—Land of Talk
Why Bother?
Because right now, there issomeone
out there with
a woundin the exact shape
of your words.
The Second O of Sorrow
Somehow, I am still here, long after
transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared
driving from town to town across Ohio
selling things, the music where we danced
just to keep alive. I now understand I was not
supposed to leave so soon, half a century
a kind of boulder that I’ve pushed up the hill
& now for a moment, like Sisyphus
I watch it roll.
I walk through the snow.
I breathe the dirty East Side wind
pushing past the Russian church, the scent
of fish & freighters & the refinery
filling the hole in my chest—how many years
have piled since I last stumbled out onto the ice
& sat down to die.
Only to look up at the geometry
of sky—& stood
to face whoever might need me—
What Do You Say to a Daughter When She Suspects Her Mother Is Dying
That feverish perfume of the wound on her mother’s foot is the songbird of the bees, the xylophone of her bent spine is making a cacophonous chatter, that there is a silence to the stars we may once return to. That she should go outside and play. Write your name on the stoop. Make a drawing of a house that flies through the sky. You hunt around for chalk. You concentrate on the colors like fuchsia and magenta that conceal a dark brightness. Draw with me a window in the sidewalk you say. Where are we going she asks? You want to tell her a new hospital, a new doctor with tools like in Star Trek that they scan over her mother’s body and heal her wounds, her blood, her veins. Or back to a place and a time where the Medicine Mother grinds a few twigs, some leaves into a powder that tells the body again how to spell the names of the Gods in its bones. You want to say draw me a window so I may step into and take you to see her when you were a baby and she could run through the grass through the Balkan fields of yellow flowers and climb the mountain of the cross. A window to show her before her mother’s hands turned blue as the sky after it has snowed.
My Grief Grows a White Flower
Tonight, it is my grief who speaks
beneath the dying laurel tree
in late bloom, this spring evening.
Silence is its rotting womb
eaten from the inside by red ants,
the hole in the black center
of its trunk, my daughters cannot
climb or its limbs will break,
the one your father planted
when you were first born,
now like you it bends
in the coming storm, the clouds
that push across the slate sky.
Nothing stills its weeping,
nothing is hushed, the branches
>
sway a slow dirge, & Death,
who has become my companion,
I hear beneath the wailing wind
the quiet click of his bony fingers
weaves a wreath of fallen thorns.
After Surgery
Forget the red berries on the snow. Forget how you were hungry but couldn’t eat, and the nurse who never came soon enough with the morphine. Forget the pain. Your pale face like a small moon. Your hair unwashed and unbraided, and all the papers they made us sign like citations. And the long walk from the parking lot in the snow, nervous I would not see you again, as I drove our daughters to school then rushing back across town to hold your IV’d arm. To wipe the drool from your mouth. And then more doctors, and the veins they couldn’t find. The holes they left in your arms. And the tests that told us nothing. And then another surgery, and another, and another, then it was time to go home, because we had one. With lists of appointments like citations, your limbs bandaged and bruised. Before we left, I glanced out that seventh-story window, down at the street of strangers rushing off to the normal world we no longer belonged to—
In the Light of One Lamp
I crawled into bed and closed my eyes and not long after heard the small hooves of the horses, the tiny ones that gallop in our dreams, or are they the dreams of our children, galloping through the black ruins. Everything we do is against the crippling light. To hear them cry at night is to know they are alive. When they are scared they come galloping down the long hall calling your name. Tonight, it is our oldest daughter, the red mare with her fiery mane, she snuggles in between us and falls back to sleep in your arms, to that secret place inside her, she barely moves, crossing over the river, through a grove of alders, through the black ruins, she is the one who once whispered, the grass it knows everything.
The Bravery of Birds
My daughters are shouting at the starlings in their murmuration. Their mother watches from a porch chair. The writhing pain, as if she is a broken necklace. Stones of pearls in the grass. Even the oxy does not help. The light of pills. The color of nausea. The color of sunlight for the crippled and the lame? To get up each day despite hopelessness. I think of Bernadette, and how they questioned her, the brilliant light of Mary who appeared to her in a grotto and offered water to heal the world. They called her a liar and a cheat. And only after decades was it revealed: the tumors and the pain that ravaged Bernadette. You will not be happy in this world, the Mother of God explained. And yet in the scrubbing of floors, the life lived in a cell away from the world, in this suffering there must have been something more. We go on suffering without fear? Though Bernadette suffered, was there envy or fear? Was there joy? Who of us is ever not weary? I watch the starlings swoop and dive as if they know the air will never let them go. My daughters run and their mother rocks in her chair and holds her bandaged foot, and bites down hard against the pain. And I want to ask her if she ever returns to that room overlooking the bay, when she was strong. And the lavender was high. And a few green flies buzzed against the screen. And the scent of salt and sea roses wafted through the window we left open, lying naked on the bed in the amethyst-colored light. O Love, were we too not afraid?
Scribbled on the Scaffolding of
You can love someone fiercely. You can love them like a country. You can love them like a cathedral, or like a fretting child. And then they leave you. Even if they are right there, they go somewhere else. You tell them come back and they turn towards the gutter’s wind. They cook casseroles. You start to put a brick down in your chest. Then another brick. And that wall grows. You get going. And the waters rise behind that giant wall. You can say you get no more of my heart. You can move on. You can tell them to their face. You can drive a thousand miles. You can drive a thousand more. Years can pass. And then one day you look up and you can find in their face that person you loved from years ago. And it all goes to hell, that Giant Dam you built crumbles and falls, and it all floods out, and you dive straight down and deep as you can in that long-lost drowning. Let them find my body floating on that river. Let them say he dived deeper than anyone. Let them carry me to her and lay me at her feet. Then pour the gasoline. And strike the match and the plumes of ash will flutter all around my Beloved’s hands like black butterflies.
We a New Ledger
I want to find a new name for the wind, for the smoke
curling around her eyes in some punk club
after hours high. I want to rewrite each day after it dies,
so it may keep us breathing. The barbiturates of our mouths.
Push into the black dirt, lying in the long grass
outside of an abandoned farm house,
the soft cindered earth of our dead.
I want to find one new word for making music,
a language which is nearly song itself,
electric as copper tubing joining our palms
into applause, or more like the pause
right before the clapping, the rising hairs
on the back of our hands. Where is the name for that?
A name like a birthmark in a small town to get some fix.
What is the smeared name written inside a matchbook?
The strange scratching on the wooden pallet at work,
the letters you can read in the seeded grass, the shape
of a clipped fingernail is a moon and a word.
How nearly everything was. A name to disown
what has been done. A new name for the rain,
a new name for a cloud, an old name for the dirt.
The oldest we witness. Gripping it in our two fists.
Poem Written with a Cough
After we were fired from the hospital
we dove into Prince.
We shot junk & ate junk food
& watched MTV for weeks.
We fucked on the bare mattress
with our futures now behind us.
The lengthening of our shadows
ground down my teeth.
All the noise was brilliant, a radio
in my brain I tuned to the station
I hummed the beautiful static of tiny pills.
I peeled the torn red wallpaper
& wrote my dairy of the amber rain
on the scraps. Outside, a fire escape
that led to an alley.
I’d climb down to stare at the brick wall.
I folded my body into an envelope
& mailed it to the department of dead letters.
~
Stories are seeds & the circus
of us was like a trapeze
of sunflowers, bowing
in the deserted lot of decades
beside the closed
down paper mill—
maybe the dope man wouldn’t arrive—
for you the matchstick girl
by the side of the road.
I refused to betray
like the small wooden figurine
of the Black Madonna you clutched
in your coat pocket. Luck
in little ways, you always said.
To protect us—
like the glint of a blade.
We used to cut the cord.
When you kissed you tasted
like peppermints
you stole from the bowl
of every clinic counter.
You my crushed orchid—
How we trembled
like the lighter’s flame
to the bent spoon
of our bodies—
We Pay the Rent We Breathe
To say the word orange
is to say a kind of light,
the light of our daughter,
as she peels an orange
at the hospital, beside your IV’d arm
already beginning to infiltrate,
every day the pills
you were—
we were our own exile
on the bare mattress,
our daughter’s chord
diminished,
down the dark hallway
towards her crib, your swayed
reaching—
removed the night’s sleep mask.
Across the arm’s frets, the small prick
& then the push; leaning
in the pool hall door,
another one of your ex’s boys
strung-out, swallowed
peace by jagged piece.
In the city of stray dogs
& stolen cell phones,
the pregnant girl
at the Get Go Mart
The Second O of Sorrow Page 1
