Poetry: Sean Thomas Dougherty
These Ordinary Days
Out of the brown bag I place
the red wine and sack of sugar
I swing our eldest daughter
despite my swollen knee
and fix you coffee with cream,
and the clouds swirl like the unsayable
our daughters curly headed
and crying, run out
the glass porch door,
I watch them through
an invisible window
Like the one between us
and how I no longer
wake up with my eyes
and your mouth near
my mouth how you have to bend
your bones into a curve
because of your back
and the wounds on your foot,
and the girls are screaming
they have found a grasshopper
and I pray they do not pull
off its legs, these simple living things
I’ve come to love, and a crow
is cawing high above, and our smallest daughter
is blowing dandelion wishes
that suspend the air
and still breathing, we read the paper
and the weather says rain
and your mother and the horoscopes
are good news and I cut an onion
and maybe we will grill hotdogs
and some corn.
And the girls are napping, and you
now are leaning against the sink
in pain, and how can I explain
and cross this far away county
between us the fields
we ran, the smoky places
where you held my head like a prayer
and said my name
and the years you’ve gathered,
your teeth gone, the lines
like letters carved around your eyes,
a kind of runes I cannot read,
and so I take your hand, and I turn
on the faucet and let it run.
And the dishes are done.
And your mother is a shadow
moving toward sleep
through the blue light
of some detective flick.
And the extra shifts
your father is snoring
for money and to hide,
and we all have eaten,
and our daughters
are so young but somehow know
not to ask that afternoon
on the sidewalk we drew words
and butterflies in chalk,
and then the erasure of the rain
became a beautiful blur
a blur we became drinking wine
until you went to the bathroom
to unwrap your bandages
for hours, and the pain.
And how empty the bed remains
every night that undented space
in the exact shape of your body
is the absence I trace
these ordinary days against dying
Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of seventeen books including The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018), co-winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism (NYQ Books, 2019). He works as a Med Tech in Erie, Pennsylvania. His website is seanthomasdoughertypoet.com.
Image: theverge.com
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