Have you ever seen a Pomeranian goose? One comes to visit me every morning at the end of third shift. It's domesticated & the people next door to our medical facility let it wander. It waddles up to the walk as I leave work: honk honk do you have bread sir? Perhaps a fish or two? It's brown & white & big & a bit pushy. Pretty bird I tell it & it preens like an addled swan. I always wonder what the birds are saying. How do starlings sway in their murmuration across the sky? After do they tell each other, dude we nailed that one like a Top Gun. People want to find God, or know the secrets to the afterlife, but I’d be happy to know the words to the frantic grieving that flutters the wind when a nestling falls. Or the exact second the sun rises & the blackbirds, robins, & wrens all tremolo the trees with trills. But maybe the meaning is it’s all music. Maybe that is what music is? Maybe a song is just like sunlight. What does sunlight mean? Or rain? What is the absence of the story inside the rain?
So Much Even the Sudden Rain
My grandmother was at the widowed age when walking became “difficult.” That was the word she used when my mother urged her to use a cane.
She tended the old pink sea roses I thought near dead, only a few blooms she cut with her arthritic hands. Long passed eighty, the way she bent
from the waist, & often I wondered if she would stand again, but before I could help her, there she was, tough & gnarled as any bonsai, or an unkept lilac bush.
I caught her smoking sometimes, one cigarette, she lit at the end of the day watching the sudden rain she loved fall. Years later she watched my daughter
run calling grandma grandma grandma two syllables I thought might bring her back but even my name was far from her tongue difficult to recall through gray eyes,
I thought maybe she saw someone from a world I never knew, long ago on the dusty farm of Oklahoma where she learned to speak to crows, caw caw caw she’d say
& they always answered, turning their heads on any telephone line or fence, as the thorned pink of sea roses lost their petals, her arthritic hands
still clipped as a rectangle of sunlight through the porch glass warmed the rug at her slippered feet, she drowsy singing a few soft words along with Ella
on the radio, “your looks are laughable” giving a small chuckle, cormorants & gulls called & the smell of the sea blew in from the bay, her left-hand palm up on her lap as if waiting for someone to hold it.
What the Blues Is
When I was about 19 years, I recall this summer night
I put this Etta James cassette on my Sony Walkman
& took a bottle of wine I stole underage from the packy store
in my gym bag & walked down through the mill yard
between the empty mills & the lights from the west side
tenements rising up across the river, I sat drinking that wine,
rewinding this song about her man gone like my friend died at seventeen
drowned at the quarry— one shouldn’t know grief
like that at seventeen, grief a boy’s back is not made to carry
like a friend with a wounded foot, but the blues don’t know no age limit,
it’s sudden & old at the same time it takes who’s left you
Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of 20 books, including the forthcoming Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. He works as a Med Tech and caregiver for folks recovering from traumatic brain injuries.