BOA Editions - The second O of sorrow: poems

Copyright 2018 by Sean Thomas Dougherty All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1-942683-55-1 eISBN: 978-1-942683-56-8 For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at . Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Codeare 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 on page 72 for special individual acknowledgments. Cover Design: Sandy Knight Cover Art: Motel Peninsula by Greg Valiga Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn BOA Logo: Mirko 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 BOA Editions, Ltd. 250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306 Rochester, NY 14607 www.boaeditions.org A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (19381996) The Second O of Sorrow Forgive me if this seems extremeI dont 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 clocks 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 ONeil Apollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio. Hart Crane Ill love you like I love you Then Ill die Land of Talk Why Bother? Because right now, there is someone out there with a wound in 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 Ive 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 chesthow 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 mothers 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 mothers 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. My Grief Grows a White Flower Tonight, it is my grief who speaks beneath the dying laurel tree in late bloom, this spring evening. 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 couldnt 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 IVd arm. To wipe the drool from your mouth. And then more doctors, and the veins they couldnt 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.