The Singing Wreck of Us
       

What is passing passes like this: how in spring
when the melting begins, the ice breaks,

the groan & ache of it loud enough to fill the sky.
The sudden fractures unseen until the shatter.

Which is why I hold your swollen hand
& see the constellations of the wounds in your skin

& try not to make something more of them than pain,
but we both know there must be something more.

Something to lift our lives
& drop us down across town,

or in a hospital where they pronounce you cured.
But we both know this pain

will only end in a formal light.
To go this way is common

as the light that creeps over the lake
this humid summer morning, walking

quietly on tired dog feet. It is too early
for the children to be not asleep,

I hear their tiny feet running in search of the dog.
They pull his tail and chase him barking.

I am not trying to say anything I fear
except now it is the dog days of summer

where we eat & sweat, & inside my chest
is a church wall, somewhere to pray,

or am I refugee, asking for amnesty?
No, it is the now where we are refugees.

Starlight even each evening hurts my eyes.
If there is nothing beatific to claim from this life

all I can claim for us is this your razored breath
as I watch you fall to sleep on the coach,

or the way our daughters
play a game they've invented, they sit eyes closed,

face to face & touch each other's cheeks
with their fingers & do not say a sound,

as if they are speaking their own secret
dialect, almost purring, before one suddenly screams

& pushes the other down, & they tumble,
falling together, teaching themselves about pain,

& how it passes, how everything passes—

Tweet

Copyright © 2020 Sean Thomas Dougherty All rights reserved
from Not All Saints
The Bitter Oleander Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission