Today I’ll turn south instead of east and head down Fulton
rather than Birch, I’ll swap the body shop for the fruit stand,
the chemical stench of Bondo for the sweetness of banana and pear.
For a while now I’ve been able to cry out of one eye only,
it makes no difference, the left or the right, no sense.
It’s not like hot and cold at the sink, it’s not like one eye starts
to gush out of pity for the spat upon or ditched, and the other
gets going out of joy for the radical freedom of the hawk,
or the erotic beauty of scarlet calamint, or the sudden acceptance
of God in a swirl of doubt. Today I’ll pass the P.O. and the library,
the day-blind shop fronts and the giant flag, instead of pressing
my palm like always to the catalpa trunk, where lightning scrawled
its autograph one spring, instead of stopping to eat my bag of nuts
in the park. I think my crying must have to do with the fact
that I never learned how to mourn, that no one took the time
to teach me. I think the trouble comes from the way I sit in a room
of thought, and crack open valves and flues to release the acids,
the salts and smoke, but never really break my mold, and never sweep
the dust and fragments into the hole of what I’ve lost. Today I’ll stop
at the pond and watch the ducks, it’s been a while, the ugly
Muskovies and the handsome mallards, fight over hunks of bread
instead of planting myself on a bench and listening to naked branches
comb the wind’s hair, or trying with closed eyes to name the birds
by their chirps. I kissed my second brother on the forehead,
I tell myself, alone in that dim parlor, before they rolled him down
the rails. I kissed that broken man before he fell to flame.
But I think one of my eyes is telling me I have to dive into the fire
after him, have to try to save him a thousand times and fail
a thousand times and dive again. And I think maybe the other eye
is saying—it must be this—that I’m letting my pounds thin down
to ounces, that I’m running away from and out of time.
Today I’ll gaze up at clouds with bellies of iron instead of tin.
Just one shift in direction, one street change, and rain, if it comes,
pours inside the coat collar instead of sliding down the jowls.
I will stand on the shore of dusk until the water blackens
and the day falls mute. And maybe, with any luck, I’ll turn
my heart inside out, and sob down both raw cheeks.
The Crying Problem
GREGORY FRASER is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Little Armageddon (Northwestern University Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares. The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, Fraser teaches at the University of West Georgia.