Sean Thomas Dougherty

GS of Rosabetty Munoz Lacoa trans Claudia Nunez De Ibieta

What is the name for this, body to body here
As in you are, limb to limb, for decades we

Travel as if on the same tributaries that converge
Into a river. Or the way railroad tracks move toward

The horizon. Riding these rails, what word the
Name for this unwavering? This only

City whose streets we’ve paved underneath a distant star.
How do the florists memorize the names of flowers? Let’s

Call one now. Come to us floriculturist this fall
When the leaves are gold with light. Come in

With your bouquets of rare blooms. The word love
Means little, we need a word like aperture of

Breath in the saxophone’s body: a new meter mine,
& yours, a word musical or maybe from botany. Let’s

Say perennial, let’s say adventitious, stems that drop
Shoots that become roots, or acuminate our

Bodies down to a single shared point. Or as if oars
Side by side through a river till wood dissolves down

To dirt or dust. Our bodies dissolution to
Syntax, the conjugations that give us shape where

Shape was only sound—the way a trumpet taps the
The dead a formal declaration, a sonata weaved of night:

The way we reach for one another, one word that doesn’t
Mean the way our bodies cling as if bewildered they exist—

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Elegy for K with lines from John Rybicky’s While My Body Lasts

The man I watch over says night night, like a parent when
He heads to bed, a week after his friend died. My
Father would say this too, a simple love

Note—to repeat the night twice was
A way words tucked me in, I’d lay still
In the room & listen to my breath—was I alive?

The man is troubled & stays up late. I
Ask him what he misses most, could
He go home to visit soon. I watch him fling

His cigarette butt with rage. I have to ask myself
Is the grief of his friend passing through
Our bodies, one by one, across vast

Distances the dead appear or are they near as cathedrals
Lit by votive candles? The man says my
Sister may come to see me on the first.

He limps down the hall to his room. He is shedding
His skin, his grief, cell by cell. The
Days pass. I add bricks

To the house I’ve built from
Grief so I can keep from weeping—that
House is now in ruins. I walk a city

Now necropolis, sitting on the bed where
A man once slept. The living man says night night I
Know not just to me, but to his friend who taught

Him the names of trees, blackbirds
They both fed bread to as the dusk set to
Dark—how sometimes they would sing

Rock songs with the cable, their great
Off-key voices filled the earthen
Urn of this house like hymns

Not often said. What passes through
Us leaves a trace, the way with breath their
Hands on windows made silhouettes.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty's most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. His awards include the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review. He works as a long-term third-shift Caregiver and Medtech for folks with traumatic brain injuries.