The Second O of Sorrow

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

  with the quart of liquor

  & a box of menthols.

  Grief

  I nodded into the wet dog smell of it

  heaved it over my back,

  carried it like a man

  who bears a wooden cross,

  he will nail himself to—

  Triptych of Desire and the Duende

  The wind had been sitting for some time.

  I dreamed I was a porter in a house of fog.

  Someone was sandpapering a chair.

  Desire: Let’s take a sabbatical from the burning edges.

  I need a new coat. One they wore before I was born.

  At the intersection of Imagination and Death, the Kids of Chance

  drive past their own tombs.

  High on glass.

  And lyrics of astonishing levies.

  Month after month, year after year.

  To reassemble the eyes, out of this appalling place.

  The gaunt priests of the street corner calling their price.

  Gun shots and guitars.

  And who chanted, tenderness resembles a quiet river. Desire is the

  flood.

  The choreography of the trees.

  Every time we kiss we are saying goodbye.

  There is nothing I want to tell you except through the dark.

  What does it all matter if we don’t have God—?

  Sunflowers that grow in tenement backyards.

  Old men leaning into their own hands. Double Shots of Regret—

  The unfinished houses of our lives.

  ~

  When she was gone from there, M wasn’t right. I wired him some

  money but I never saw him again.

  You are the long blue dress of winter.

  You are the light the dead eat at morning.

  I am their bowls of teeth, their bellies full of flies. I died long ago

  but was reborn and slid back to this place to find you.

  I am the window in that church left half open, to let the demons out,

  or in?

  The lightning bugs our daughters cup in their hands.

  And then he said funeral home. And then he said the beautiful heft of

  your hair.

  It was then I wanted to tell him about Desire. But instead I handed

  him his ticket at the Greyhound and said what I said.

  I hear he is out and so are you and I. So long I am surprised you

  remembered.

  I swallowed a tiny yellow pill yesterday and was reminded of it all.

  ~

  How many have come looking for us to find nothing.

  Even the whiskey in the room is borrowed.

  At the hospital, you tore a hole in the light,

  when you climbed out the roof to escape.

  We are always escaping, before we were crippled.

  I bought you a new pair of flat black shoes.

  Heavy as a nun’s breasts.

  For weddings or funerals? you asked.

  And what could I say? Your name lives alone in a small house on

  another occasion.

  I did not get an invitation, a card for the annunciation, you

  whispered.

  I said, it is an unpublished vacancy, we moved in long ago.

  In a country where we do not understand the orders

  we would disobey them if we did.

  I would grow a beard and you would carry a Molotov cocktail.

  Is this what Desire is? Is this the Duende? Then I want to carry a

  machete.

  To cut off the wings of the angel.

  Look at the blades of your hands, I said. Look at my bleeding

  shoulders.

  And then you gasped at my razored wings, peeking out of my gaping

  wounds.

  Red Dirt

  I went to Brucie’s house. I was sixteen.

  Where is your mother, I asked?

  Upstairs calling to my aunt, gone for decades.

  We told jokes and poked each other

  until we heard his mother in the attic

  softly talking. Then the silence

  and the creaking chair from the other side

  of this world.

  Red Dirt women can all speak to their dead.

  In the Absence of Others I Wanted Something Brave

  Yes, I accept I declare to no one. I get on the open road. I remember my father drinking. I’ll forget my name except for the ache of my bones. I knew this much was mine. For the poem can call me sweetcakes. Tell me we are out of vegetables. Kiss me full on the mouth. These taboos we try to explain. The data proves it is difficult. Go to the diner: order your sausage and eggs, sup on the slit throats of swine.

  Blood-red leaves like knives cut the air of autumn.

  Call up the critics, the professors with their funny hats. Ask them what they know about suffering? Their long litanies and references will make the most colicky child fall fast asleep.

  What lullaby but the winter wind off the lake, and needing a new coat.

  A poem is a wing, a bird without wings. A poem is a sparrow that walks across my snowy lawn this winter, when the wind chill is near 15 below, a poem is a kind of absent song.

  A poem is not a bullet, though some may claim. But I imagine a poem could be a bullet. Or is the poem the hole that is left when the bullet goes through?

  A poem is not a carburetor. Or a poem could be the carburetor of the human heart. A carburetor that has not been cleaned, a carburetor full of gunk. But I suspect the poem is really written in the scratches in the piston. I suspect the poem is really the gasoline. A poem is a pool of gasoline. Burning.

  Sometimes I read these things that say a poem is a theory, or driven by a theory, or written by a certain theory. I see those kinds of poems all the time, some of them have body, climb the ladders of the stair. But is that what a poem is, that makes a poem what we are? The writer bending over to type her theory poem, the hands of another writing his theory poem. All the collisions of empire and class?

  I am eating violets. I am pissing on a parked police car outside the Day-Old-Donuts shop. They’ve named him the Endowed Chair (I mean how funny, how masculine, how drearily obscene). And I imagine the cold wind outside clattering against their tenured walls. They’ve named their house. They have an Edwardian garden while they declaim they are the Avant-Garde! Viva the Revolution! As long as our hands remain clean.

  Put down your pen I want to say. Drive out to the edge of town to the State Prison. A poem is the theory of a prisoner. Or the prisoners, bending their backs in their orange jumpsuits, slave labor on the road works. We live in a time where every theory is a failure. We have no need for more literary theories. When cops kill us and the government has slave detention camps up and down the border, and men in dark suits like white hoods make profits.

  The poem does not need an award. The poem is for those who’ve lost. The words tenure and poetry should never be in the same sentence. A poem that is almost as translucent as the edge of a slice of apple. The words professor and poetry are at war. For the poem tells the professor, burn the classroom walls to the ground. It tells the professor to plant a tree inside every student’s head. And it may bloom, like a revolution.

  Follow the lines to the entrance of the gulag. What is it worth, a cup of coffee and a cigarette for a man’s life? What is the weight of money when faced with the poem? The poem has dropped out of high school. A poem is not a college, but a collage. A poem is not a university, but a universe. There is nothing to worship like an urn. As soon as one writes it down, the poem changes. It is a spiral, shifting slow above us, a cosmos inside us, like the constellations, like the staircase of our bodies. You can never kill the poem. Erase the poem. The absence of song and the poem is still. There is nothing here about Capital. The poem is the first breath and the last death. It is as hard it is said for a Professor to enter the Kingdom of Poetry as it is for a camel to fit through the ‘e’ of Helvetica. A poem i
s not an Academy of Poets. There is no Academy of Poets.

  Tamir Rice

  I try to translate the Aramaic of the sky.

  The violet streaks of dusk

  that frame our youngest daughter

  drawn in two-point perspective—

  she is a you & I, separate

  & sublime. Her voice a constant why.

  The video she found online, in her head

  on repeat. Why did the policeman shoot the boy?

  she wants to know. He was playing.

  She climbs into your lap.

  Around our daughter’s lips, chewed bits

  of white petal. She’s been eating clover.

  The lilac bush scythes

  against the wooden fence. In the hive

  of the wind, there is something

  sickly sweet blowing in.

  The swing hangs itself slowly in the dark.

  Tattoos

  Too often I write “hands” when I mean “sigh.” Too often I write “I” when I mean “too few.”

  ~

  Too often I’ve dreamed of Tu Fu, folding his poems into origami boats. He released them into the current to be found down river by peasants who could not read them.

  ~

  The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, “Shhhh, we’ll be lost if they find us.” “How can we be lost when we are found?”

  ~

  What moment do I have to tell you about the winter today? I walked past the Serbian bar at 7 AM, already saw the old men leaning over their glasses, drinking in the dark.

  ~

  I want to tell you there is a chance for forgiveness. Camus wondered this, as French napalm burned the bodies of Berbers under the North African sun.

  ~

  To decide I am incapable of anything you can ask of any music.

  ~

  To decide instead of a statement, to write: the rain passed over her like a language. The prisoners paused over their shovels together as if deciding the weight of each handful of earth.

  ~

  There was a weight to the wind, it shackled my ankles to the ice. It pushed me down as if praying.

  ~

  The similarity between lovers and readers?

  ~

  Both we are traveling towards—

  ~

  To embrace on the street the stranger for no reason.

  ~

  Other than one was weeping.

  Parade Street

  November sunlight swooning around the bare tree in my backyard, the crab apples churned to dirt, the gritty sunlight Oppen wrote of—not lemon light—but pale white, a color like chalk the children scribbled across the sidewalk where the boy shot the other boy last week. Alphonso was the dead one’s name, who until then I didn’t know. His cursive’d name in white and green and blue and brilliant flowers still drawn on the spot where he fell. The other day I saw his little sister I think playing with a crushed can, kicking it by herself down the street. Crushed by the light of November, crushed by the aluminum light: we can climb back into bed, pull the covers over our heads, sing only the dead, as if Alphonso has disappeared, is no more than the bouquet’d requests, the stuffed animals, the handwritten notes, the letters and photos the neighborhood left on the telephone pole where he was shot down. No more than petals, wind-blown, he is breath, breathing as we all are, and the sunlight is breath. And his sister running home now an only child is breath, and there is breathing all up and down Parade Street, past the white boys high on something trying to sell shoplifted toys, or the too-thin girls who lean outside of Pete’s Bar calling out to passing cars, and Kay is breath, the elementary school lunch lady sipping a Pabst at the Polish Falcons social club, who tells me how she gave Alphonso second dessert at Our Brothers Christian Academy when he was small because even then he was so sweet.

  Youngstown Monologue: Captured Light Stained Glass

  (after the art by Kimberly Nelson)

  This cityscape made of light, each block we live,

  each block we bury our dead

  who become light,

  each square like a coffin,

  or are they sheets of granite,

  like the ones our fathers

  hauled from the quarry,

  or the sheets of steel

  our fathers unrolled at the mill,

  the black smoke & molten ore,

  how long since the doors

  closed? Oh mother

  as you rock in your chair

  I see you and your house

  hidden in the dark lines,

  all those years of shifts

  as you drove to Martin

  Luther Elementary to serve

  lunch in the cafeteria,

  now it is all an absence

  except when you speak

  & the room fills

  with the light of stories

  of those other children

  you loved far from me

  that stream through the stained

  glass window when I wheel you

  to the cathedral on Sunday

  to hear another kind of music,

  we hear inside our chests,

  and each evening when I lift

  you out of your wheelchair

  and you press against me,

  I know to live inside this fragile skin

  is to be the light captured by stained glass.

  You’re Good at Going Under

  The lilac bushes shimmer in the evening light, the elms send down their pods of spinning rain. When was the last time that you’ve eaten? You are good at going under. No one ever sees you weep. Where others shift into survival, a shining place. You dive down deep. To sigh the world its shape, to slip beyond desire into the evidence of everything that seams, you’ve heard the ringing all around, despite the unclasping of these flowers, the earth opening its outstretched palms as if to plead, the purple loosestrife sprawls along the railroad tracks. You drive down to the lake, the rising of the wind, the dark approaching clouds. There is no slamming of the door. It is a quiet drown. There is never nothing loud.

  Far from Any Classroom

  far from the talk of writers about writing, far from Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton, far from the bar and the back room at the “writer’s conference,” far from the book fair, far from the Carnival, where the barkers are selling our lives for a handout, a grant, a bit of good gossip that ruins a career, far from anything named career, there in the dives and back streets, there by the carapace of the steel mill in Youngstown, the refinery, the closed-down paper mill along the lake, by the railroad tracks that run to Buffalo and Cleveland and Mumbai, where two girls are blowing up pop cans with M-80s, there in the dust and smoke and their cutoff shorts and their stolen cigarettes, as they walk down the 12th Street tracks towards dusk—there in the sirens and the singed sleeves, there in the basements where someone is putting on a blue dress, unfolding a glow-in-the-dark star chart, where someone can’t find their 9 MM, where someone is lacing up their work boots for the last shift at the Forge before they are laid off, and the long drive back through the dark, the small green numbers of the radio bringing a few notes, a few AM psalms. Is all we need, to keep going. Without sorrow is to become something more than sorrow. Never forget. To shape a breath. The chest must rest. Before it rises.

  Karaoke Night at the Y Not Bar, Carnegie, PA

  She was more beautiful than a stack of empty pallets at the

  end of a night’s shift,

  this large black woman in a red dress, a slight limp, taking

  the microphone at

  the Karaoke bar, the white middle-class accountant type in

  his brown vest

  leaning over his pool cue as his opponent, the thick hard

  muscled black man in

  a tight white tee and Steelers cap, paused to see this

  woman they must’ve known

  (the joint so small, so sure of itself) open her mouth and

  out came Aretha

  Frankli
n’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You—she

  took the room apart,

  put it back together better—her voice’s urgency

  swung a new frying pan upside her man’s head, reclaimed

  lost wages, dug

  the hard earth, blessed the bar’s marriages, mourned its

  miscarriages,

  praised the Allegheny mountains

  in spring, coal cars uncoupling, unpaid bills burned, thirty

  years of children

  and church, Pittsburgh on a Thursday night and no bus fare

  or last call

  to the other side of town, long past the hour when the

  mill-gate closed forever

  and the second shift spilled out to the Y Not Bar, Y not sing

  belted the fat white,

  yet blonde and attractive hostess and Sister rose from her

  three sisters (all in their fifties) lining up Long

  Island Ice Teas, rose like a slap in the face

  of the ordinary,