| The 2River View | 30.2 (Winter 2026) |
To return to the quarry where we swam I close my eyes and we’ve just met on Canal Street in the shade of our Red brick tenement flats. What is love but sunlight on your aunt’s hair by the river as she sang in Creole. You are reading the bible on your steps, the smell of gas from the mill, the shoe works where the women stitched. Dry wall falling in the three-floor tenement. You dreamed of playing in a rock band like Aerosmith, a guitar slung low on your hip, a dream of making it out of that mill town by the dirty river the dirty river and the yellow dye foam by the falls. I wanted to be old when we were kids, wanted to walk along Canal Street by the river my whole life: I wanted you to grow old with me, older brothers, raise our children, have our families be one big clan. Your mother kissed your forehead in the coffin, saw my own mother weep over your drowned body. Your sister a girl just a girl who grieved her brother by the canal by the river she sat as the workers walked to the last factories by the bridge. Against a brick wall your sister bounced a ball over and over. I never saw her cry. Your mother took her to mass, old mother from a seaside town in Haiti. She wailed against this dirty town that took her son. I felt old as we gathered at the edge of town to toss handfuls of dirt, the clouds I remember were cumulous. There are those who say there is a veil drifting between this world and the next, across our skin the way the moon can cast a thin veil of light. The streets poured liquor out in your honor. The wind at the river was heavy with fires we made along its banks. Embers like stars rose from the burning wood. Out of the trees came a dirty dog, the old mutt your uncle owned. How he howled for your absence. I sat next to him getting drunk beside a dirty Ford up on blocks, atoning under that old willow weeping our your name—
Sonny Was it Sonny Rollins who knew the way a sentence or a saxophone can become a songbird, or a poem can be in the shape of the Brooklyn Bridge, that what should be is often tempered by what can have a shape that blurs at the edges beyond meaning or memory’s opaque avenues, meaning water from the fire hydrant the children jacked in summer the way a river is both there and not, both waterfall and rapids, the way we see the page of night is punctuated by the stars which aren’t there in deep space that isn’t silence or have faith in this light that rises with the incoherent heart’s beat meaning the after-music of when we’re dead we’re really not the way a riff seeks to say as much that was as is the way the water runs into the gutter something tells the children gathered chords beyond explainable except perhaps the underlying facts of joy but joy unscripted, the cool rushing indigo flow from the hydrant as bodies dazzled in the street when summer burned something simultaneous called them to dance a dance that was irrefutable— | ||
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 along Lake Erie. website |
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