The Men and the Quiet
       

In memory of his mother, his shirt started crying:
it detached from him right there in the vanishing light
and rose up like a great moth.
It was a lost cause, like a revolution.

Years ago, in the underground
tornado shelter his father built,
his father who worked in the steel mill
in Lorain—he was beginning to hear him more:

"Son, inside this strange skin is a star
bright as the flame I stare into that melts
ore." His father held out his hand
as if holding a bloody heart.

His mother, a minuet. His mother
so pained and strange, caught in her own grief.
She would break plates one after another:
white sharp shards, she’d pick up slowly

after she grew sick. He could tell you all this
with a quietness. Like horses on the side of a hill.
And then his shirt started crying. So hard it was
drenched. And he took it off. Right there

outside on break, smoking, and threw it.
And it rose up on the wind like a white swan.
And kept rising. And after that he was ok.
He drank his coffee cold.

The men who knew his father died.
"What happens when you get older
is you get over it. You buy flowers
to set on the table. You say your prayers.

You learn to live alone
the way you learned to love
everything

not dead."

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Copyright © 2020 Sean Thomas Dougherty All rights reserved
from Sugar House Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission