The Second O of Sorrow

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

to make our little world levitate

  enough the meanest foreman

  Saint Michael

  might plead, I’m sorry, have a raise, it’s my fault.

  Pittsburgh

  Last night I walked, wandered miles through Lawrenceville and Bloomfield, up and around Liberty Ave, past cathedrals and cafeterias, diners named Mama Leona’s and boarded houses, heart-shaped graffiti sprayed onto dumpsters, corner bars named Lou’s Corner Bar, bookstores where novelists stood behind glass reciting sorrows, a strung-out girl I talked to for a long time named Becky, an old Italian guy named Frankie who said he knew Roberto Clemente, I ate two slices of pizza and gave my crusts to a stray dog. I gave a cigarette to a kid named Juan waiting for the bus, who when I asked what was on his headphones rather than just saying the name recited the lyrics filling the air with unheard verbs. I ended up on a pool table and played so poorly, my friend Cody shaking his head making fragments, I wanted to collage bread, I wanted to collage the steam from a grate with a Pop Warner football game, and a mother in braids yelling, that’s my boy, that’s my boy, that’s my boy, that’s my boy, like a mantra shouted out against anything. I could have stayed.

  Psalm of the Working Poor

  It’s not that I have nothing.

  It’s that nothing halves me.

  Toledo, Ohio 1977

  Fried chicken and sweet potato pie. Blatz beer on our fathers’ breath. That autumn Michael and I bagged leaves and burned weed with Anthony, walking house to house with a rake, ringing the doorbell and not running. He taught us how to ask for what we would be owed. We raked and mowed the small lawns of auto parts plant workers and huffed rags from the gas, irrevocably wrecked. Skinny cracker girl Franny, with the racist grandma, bent over algebra equations on her front steps, put them down to dance for us with dark-skinned big-boned Carolyn. They did the Freak to an eight-track disco jam rising out of Mr. Robinson’s Lincoln Town Car—doors opened, speakers blaring, he washed that damn car every day. My father sold things, drove long miles, then came home to fall asleep in front of the rabbit ears, my mother off to night school. I sat up late by an AM radio, singing the Isleys, O’Jays, Donny Hathaway’s I’ve sung a lot of songs, I’ve made some bad rhymes. Once Victor’s mother the nurse bandaged his hand while smacking him in the head repeatedly for being so stupid, burned by an M-80 he didn’t toss fast enough. We were always daring things to explode in our hands. Davey’s father’s thick arms mapped with scars from the glass factory. Each of his six children wore those scars. And we were all the shards of shiny things, black pieces of coal pressed to diamonds in the pale Ohio light. We were newly shined fenders, carburetors and the grease of a socket wrench. We worshiped ex-ABA rebel ballers, Dr. J rising from the far foul line. We were the color of food stamps and free lunch, blue denim and wide lapels. We were funky as Patti LaBelle chanting, Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? We were missed translations passed hand to hand on tiny slips of paper. We knew the secret signs, read them under a black light. Michael’s father, Vietnam vet who sold weed, sat on the back porch, playing his beat-up six-stringed guitar. Oh how he crooned those country tunes dreaming he was Charley Pride. We’d tease his son till he swung an awkward jab then we’d fall down laughing on the cracked sidewalk, scraping our knees. We were Band-Aids ripped off fast. We knew the scars you can’t see are the ones that last. Mathew’s older brother smuggled us beers out the back door at the UAW hall. We drank them under the bleachers of Scott High and talked of hoops and high school dances we snuck into and whose bra we lied about undoing, or admired the tough older girls like Franny who slapped us down for getting too close and told us of the places she would go, one day far away as Paris or Marrakesh, or the tenth moon of Jupiter. She smoked her unfiltered cigarettes and stared off at the horizon as the tornado sirens blared. She blew smoke in our faces, tugged on the strap to her halter top. She was doing the math. She already knew the metric system for starlight. The calculus for getting out—

  In the Midnight Waking

  “Father, why did you work? Why did you weep . . .”

  —Louis Simpson

  His son died one Saturday night in his sleep. Heart attack at fortyone years. Crazy Larry from my pool team buried his grown son. When Larry called to tell me he couldn’t shoot that week, he didn’t even tell me his son was dead till I asked if something was wrong. Men are like this, we keep the grief inside unless someone opens a door to let it out. Each word Larry spoke stitched together into a kind of noise I had never before heard. What is difficult to spell, the names of our fathers. The names of our sons. A year later Larry put a bullet in his head. The syllables of guilt and grief we bury in the earth. The sentences that slip through the hallways of the house in the hours after the mourners arrive.

  ~

  Sometimes we are the son, and sometimes we are the father.

  ~

  If a father is a drummer, is the son the skin the father’s palms beat upon to make a kind of music?

  Or is the father the drum, and the son the sound that rises from its chest?

  ~

  The poet Delmore Schwartz once wrote a poem in the voice of a father:

  “You must let me tell you what you fear. When you wake up from sleep, still drunk with sleep.”

  And in the same poem answered in the voice of the son. Now I am afraid, what is to be known?

  Our fathers quarreling with six pigs. Our fathers shoeing horses, changing oil. Slugging three shots of tequila. Backs bent daily with the bending of labor. Orange coveralls, badges and handcuffs. And then there is our own labor of missing our old man as he’s gone to work or county or just absent as sadly so many fathers are: and the others working triple shifts at the plant, this long labor at the plant, working the machines arrhythmic dance, to arrive in this life you must let go a certain form of dream, the long hours coming home covered in grease, a labor like trying to learn a foreign language for perhaps the language of our fathers is always from a foreign country, the blue light burning, as he sat in the car in the driveway for minutes too tired to drive back to work after working a double shift, driving the forklift, working the fryolator, the bureaucrat bent over figures labor, up before his children are awake, asleep when he comes home. How long are the long miles on the road labor, to climb the electric pole to vacuum the floor in a monogram of light, to labor in the ditchlight, bricklight, ashlight, litwick, fistlight, copperlit, light the wick of such human labor, bent backed over trowel or keyboard, warehouses factories and shops and the fluorescent hard light of supermarkets and offices, the labor of not making your quota, of making your quota labor, of a boss who hates you for no reason you can name labor, this labor of loss and grease and going away from the people you love to make money, the labor of what you can’t afford to break—

  ~

  If a father is an arrow, who is the bow?

  ~

  My father how he lifted me into the cradle of the tree, how he caught me before I fell, playing catch in a dirt lot along Islington Ave in Toledo, Ohio, or on the basketball court at Fulton School, bending my elbow into a perfect vee and then the follow through. Telling me to look at his brown eyes, his Afro bouncing above his shoulders, and the small rain falling around as we walked home in a late dusk Ohio evening covered in sweat. I think of him as I watch this young black father on the lawn of Central Tech, as I waited at the light. He was wearing a Steelers shirt and threw a football in a long spiral, calling out plays to his tall skinny son running in long red Nike shorts, topless and wiry in the humid late summer dusk, his old man bending to tussle the hair of his son, who hiked the ball as his father called out run son run son run run run

  ~

  Are we always running away from our fathers?

  ~

  Are we always running back into the arms of our fathers?

  ~

  What do we catch from our fathers? What talk must some of our fathers tell us to save our lives?

  ~

  If the father is the bow, is the so
n the arrow?

  ~

  If the son is an arrow, is the father the bow?

  ~

  I never see my son, he has turned seventeen. My son is tall as tasseled corn in late summer. He is sweet but cocksure, all elbows and knees. He is out in the underground smoky places where he runs, in the basements pasted with fliers and posters where the punk bands push the bodies of boys into collisions with bass lines and brash guitars. He is tall and lean and getting some of the razor I have longed to grow inside his sweet demeanor for the world we live in is a place of cruel and often unforgiving formalities and institutions. He calls me less. His tone grown curt. I want to hug him and smack him at the same time more often than not, that sarcastic teenage tone that makes me cringe, this tall thin curly-headed stranger who smells like a man not like the child I’d stay up late to rock and wipe his fevered head. But there is also something there so far beyond me it is like looking at a distant cloud, or that feeling when the geese begin to cover the sky in vees. He is leaving me and I am feeling something mixed inside the bowl of the second O of sorrow. An ancient soup of passage that perhaps every father has supped since the first spear was thrown above the tall grass of the Serengeti. He lives on the other side of town with his mother. She says to me, these days I don’t know too often what is going on inside him. Does he speak to you? I want to tell her, he shares everything with me, but what would that lie do? So instead I tell the truth. I get a few words, I tell her, and think like the few words she and I were reduced to by the end of us years ago. Now we chat easy of this strange man-boy we share like when we were young and still believed we would go on together, and the worry we pass back and forth like a report card, or a gift we don’t know how to accept. What I do not tell her is when I miss him, when he is out late or distant, it isn’t just him this tall stranger that I miss and worry so about, it is that three-year-old who woke from a thunderstorm or from a bad dream and frightened came running down the hallway and climbed into our bed.

  Our sons we never stop seeing them as when we carried them to sleep.

  ~

  At evening slumped in his chair after work. After the long hours on the road, my father came home to our red brick tenement flat and drank and talked. My father could really drink, but he was even better at talking. He had a history degree. He’d pour the Bacardi and tell me about Alexander Nevsky, or the Wobblies, or Nat Turner or the Molly Maguires. He knew all the great battles and what and who made the revolutions. He once wanted to be a teacher but took whatever job he found selling things to feed us. The same as so many fathers—the factory smell of someone’s father’s hands. He taught you how to tie your shoes by tying his work boots. The palm calluses on his roughened palms. The smell of aftershave and diesel.

  My father talked and talked but I did not listen. What did I know then? Some dumb kid worried about my girlfriend or getting high? What would I give to go back to those years and eavesdrop on his monologue?

  O father a thousand miles away, I am now older than you were when I left that flat along the red brick rows and never went back.

  ~

  If the father is the reel, is the son the line? Squatting on white buckets side by side along the pier? Or is the son the lure the father casts into the lake, and never despite everything reels back in?

  ~

  If the son is an arrow, when does the father let him fly?

  ~

  If the father is a bow, is the son the arrow?

  Or maybe the son is the bow, and shoots the arrow

  straight into the target of his father’s chest?

  Tonight the whole world is a house with one light burning.

  ~

  Come home, son, I say, come home to your father,

  lay your weary head on this shoulder

  and let me smell your hair for I am old,

  then help me down from this tree

  as when I held you up,

  lifting your bloody just-born body

  up before the Sun, O son, O Holy holy son.

  Leaking Light

  This malingering influenza running along the lake. Perhaps this is how we will all go, slowly, one cough at a time, the way the last century slid away, with one quiet turn of the earth. I guess if we are not gunned down that is how we go anyways, the most of us, slowly, and then one day one of us isn’t here, then another. Joe Rash had a heart attack. Doc finally walked into that good light. Larry shot himself. Frenchy just stopped breathing of old age. One day he was there playing billiards and cracking jokes right beside me, such a graceful old man. All the old pool players passing on, leaving behind their ghosts. Sometimes I forget and wonder maybe Joe will be in and bank a few with me, his slight shuffle, his gentle and deft dark hands. He held the cue lightly on his fingertips like reading Braille. He let the cue ball fly. I shout at some wise-ass kid asking for a table, no you can’t have table 20, Frenchy will be in soon. I forget he isn’t coming. Frenchy who was over 80, fought in Korea, who between games shot his insulin, the small prick and bleed. Lined up his pills. His wiry wisp of white hair. His glasses thick as stained glass. He was always leaking light. His voice deep as any river. He’s fading though, they are all fading, fast as the rain rushing over the great lake, sometimes I see them out there, flying like kites, these men, my gone friends: drawn windblown across the felt of the sky in blue chalk.

  My Youngest Daughter Brings Me Daisies and Bits of Plastic Trash

  A long hazy day we climb the air as if a ladder. The black branches of the lilac have blossomed overnight. My neighbor is outside watering her crocuses, wearing the cheap accoutrements of Annunciation, a blue Greek rosary dangling like a necklace from her neck. The first hot wind is carrying something close to faith, or at least the promise of faith. My daughter is digging in the dirt. She brings me daisies. She brings me bits of plastic trash. She names them rubies. She names them “star litter.” My neighbor is slightly drunk and walks as if she has wings, like a ballet dancer up on her toes. My daughter walked like this her first few years, the thing that told her therapist she has the palsy. She tiptoed around the house her arms gangling and flapping with joy. I named her my furious bird. We named her Akhmatova (the dark light we made her out of), waiting at the gates, like our neighbor who I am realizing is extraordinarily intoxicated, she is starting to slur and sing. My daughter now is climbing a staircase of light. The steaming laundry of the air. The trees are full of crows and grackles. I praise her body leaping vespers. She moves irregular as a votive candle’s flame. What can be strung together, these moments, are made of love, the dusk writes itself across her face. The electrocardiogram of sky above the trees is where she’s headed. Now she runs her fast and awkward gait across the lawn, her furious lisped-and-spittle speech. Her hands are sparrows. Her hands are poems.

  Biography of LeBron as Ohio

  When is a poem one word? Even at 17 he was Baraka

  on the court, Coltrane gold toned, a kind of running riff,

  more than boy-child, man-child, he was one word like Prince.

  How back in those drunken days when I still

  ran in bars & played schoolyard ball

  & wagered fives & tens, me & my colleague

  the pysch-prof drove across Eastern Ohio

  just to see this kid from powerhouse St. Vincent,

  grown out of rust-belt-bent-rims, tripped

  with the hype & hope & hip hop

  blaring from his headphones, all rubber soled

  & grit as the city which birthed him.

  We watched him rise that night scoring over 35,

  drove back across the quiet cut cornfields

  & small towns of Ohio, back to the places

  where we slept knowing that Jesus had been reborn, black

  & beautiful with a sweatband crown rimming his brow.

  He was so much more than flipping burgers & fries,

  more than 12-hour shifts at the steel plant in Cleveland.

  More than the shut-down mill in Youngs
town.

  More than that kid selling meth in Ashtabula.

  He was every kid, every street, every silo, he was white

  & black & brown & migrant kids working farms.

  He was the prince of stutter-step & pause. He was the new

  King. We knew he was coming back the day after he left

  his house in Bath Township. He never sold it.

  Someone fed his fish for years. Perhaps our hope? Fuck Miami.

  Leave Wade to wade through the Hurricane rain. LeBron is

  remembering that woman washing the linoleum floor, that man

  punching his punch card. He drives a Camaro, the cool kid

  Ohio car driving through any Main Street. He is the toll-taker, &

  he is the ticket out.

  He keeps index cards documenting

  his opponents’ moves. One leans forward before he drives.

  One always swipes with his left hand. The details like a preacher

  studying the gospel. He studies the game like a

  mathematician conjugating equations, but when he moves he is a

  choreography,

  a conductor passing the ball like a baton. He is a burst of cinders