Day Nineteen

Title: the way a woman sings when there is nothing left

I wrote a lot about rivers when I lived in Pittsburgh. They have a way of seeping into the darkest corners of your consciousness and leaving secret things there. Driving over the Rankin Bridge one night, I saw a tug boat pushing barges of coal down the river. It was a common enough site, tugs pushing barges up and down the river. But somehow, the silence of those barges and the reflection of the bridge's lights on the water and the warm autumn air of that night got stuck in me.

Earlier in the year, I had done some volunteer work cleaning up the banks of the river around the North Shore area. In between picking up empty beer cans and soda bottles, I'd find the oddest things - a child's snow boot, shoe strings, tennis balls, a used tampon applicator, tires. Those things stuck in me too.

When I sat down to write this poem, those pieces of the river appeared. Almost out of nowhere, it seemed. I didn't remember that I remembered them. They were just there. Silent as those barges of coal going up and down the river at night.

***

the moment the door clicks shut

is a river,
the lowest point,

is singing, heavy at night,
coal barges and tugs,
singing the way a woman sings when
there is nothing left
aside from the empty house,
the leftover whiskey,
the smell of sweat still on the sheets

is the years of things
you wished you’d never said

is the generations of junked metal
on the bottom of the river,
the flat tires and forgotten snow boots,
the accumulation of things no one wants

is a memory,
a drowned photograph,
a flood

is the sound of the tug
which is no sound at all