A Defense of Sorrow
voice stitches the darkness with vine and vigil
opens the spidery cracks damp in the trees with a pen
the overgrown path through our throats underlined in blue
syllables stitch fire into formed incandescence
the scrawled sentence on the bark, the teens’ acronyms
the rope frayed along the cleat teeth tight
as an old man winches the tattered sails in a storm on the Chesapeake
not the vocabularic landscape or the drama of the weightlifting hills
the remembering that matters
the rain riding the insect’s back, name it
the shorn pant cuff stuck in the escalator, name it
the yellowing pair of Converse high tops choking on the wire above, name it
remember the misremembering
the weeds and flowers along the shore as you paddled oceanward along the Hudson
the appellations that appended themselves
much heavier than the clear bottle of grief
name the going and coming, the poke and the behind-the-eye itch
the book of you
the book of them
tea stains, water at night, cuticle cuts, the blanket's dandruff on the collar
that long-form division that reveals you
carry the one in your sorrow
the children in the sandbox as parents negotiate a divorce
the middle-aged man spitting out aspirant plosives
from the ‘92 Chardonnay in strings of speed chunking enthusiasm
the syllables do us in
Infront of strangers the long lost word climbing down from the tip of your tongue
the widow shopping for vegetables knocked over
by newly named huskie pup
and the suicide looking at the traffic pass
she counts the vowels in her name just the same
name this, can you
it is all right there
the book of us, the misspelled love still our own.
