What Music Is

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 

with what's left of you
& makes it rhyme.

---

© Melanie Rae B

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.