Two poems by Sean Thomas Dougherty

After Visiting Hours

What is this grass as if the blades are strings that sing?   I think this in the park outside the hospital. It is  summer and the cicadas are whirring back and forth as dusk places her mauve tongue upon the trees. Soon the dark holds me, as I sit smoking on a bench. If I look I can see a window where you rest in a room hooked up to machines. A Junebug the shape of a cello lands on my arm, then departs—Helter skelters into the air, bumping into the streetlight and falling onto the sidewalk. I see the swarms of gnats in the streetlight’s halo and hear the soft hush of the moths. If I were to pray, there is no need to ask to enter the Temple. I am little more than an ember in the dark. We are so holy, small and frail.

The Things We Cannot Recall 

The woman has lost a few cards. She is playing solitaire. Look under the couch I say, when she says, “I’ve lost so many things. I lost my husband and my kids. I lost all my clothes.” She is upset but I’ve heard these litanies before, she forgets her room is full of clothes. She even forgets where her room is—the first one right down the hall. But she is remembering something here too: that ache in her chest of her marriage twenty years ago when she lost custody of her kids. She was drinking then, a quart of Vodka a day, that eventually took up her ability to care for herself, much less another person. I remind her she has more clothes than anyone here, and as for your husband I say, everyone including me has loved someone and fucked it up. It is what we do. and what I say is truer than I would like to admit. and she is back to playing her cards, flipping over the Ace of Diamonds. It means something but I’ve lost exactly what it means. Now she is telling me she has lost her glasses, but I tell her to touch the top of her head. Isn’t this just like memory? So close we can touch it but can’t quite get there. This woman with her long brown hair, in her mid-fifties, dressed in a long black winter coat inside because she says she is always cold. With her diabetes, and her headaches, and now and then her screams over things that are more delusions and an edge of anger that rises like a sudden wind. The years she spent black out drunk, living with her drug dealer boyfriend. All of this was written down by her caseworker and told to me in pieces over time. On her good days, she’ll sit outside in a spot of sun and smoke her Luckies, out of her will come pieces of stories, stories of when she was young, before her accident, before the drinking and the drugs, when she was a dancer studying ballet, down in Bradford, where her father worked in the forge, after her mother left, one day just drove away. Her father would take her to the Russian lady to learn with the others, to hold the bar, to bend, and though now she walks with a limp, she will stand, raising her arms up above her head, as if she has lost nothing from this life, as if she can remember what it was to be a bird: to leap, Pilate, and float into the light, and I swear at those times I see her rise, right here in the common room of this building where I work and she lives, I think perhaps the past is only a kind of translation of what was, and what we dug up from before any trauma, not with precision, but transformed and molded by the years, palimpsests of a life that goes on changing just beneath the skin. The woman stood on her good left leg, then lifted her right and held it steady off the ground, if only for one perfect moment. She became the air. Then she bowed and sat in her chair.

Sean Thomas Dougherty's most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. He works as a long term Carer and Medtech for folks with traumatic brain injuries along Lake Erie.