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?
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.
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.
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
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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.
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