Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
When the Whole, As If Many, That Message
Sound Uncle in three tongues, black suits
eating plums
by the East River. A lifetime ago
they watched women
washing white cloth
in a muddy stream. Dayshift or nightshift,
voices
floating from fire-escapes, open windows
where women lean, watching (waiting).
Vernacular,
vocabulary,
vestigial: all three point
inside this language,
to what sighs across the unintended fields.
To write as if not a funeral,
but an exhalation.
There are so many dead._
From a Battery Park bench, old men listen
to the brims of their Fedoras.
I gather one like a gesture
gravity
grabs for—a book,
in his lap, nodding out,
his reading glasses
dangling from a string—
Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of six books of prose and poetry, including Nightshift Belonging to Lorca (Mammoth Books, 2004). Awards include a 2004 Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2003 Penn State Junior Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and the 2002 Francis Locke Poetry Prize from Bitter Oleander Magazine. He teaches in the BFA program for Creative Writing at Penn State at Erie. (updated 2005)