For Steven Amato
After a long sickness, or months paused on
those last words of a friend’s before they were gone,
was there a day you returned unexpected
as bougainvillea, red as a pin prick drop
of your own blood?
My friend’s two Shepherds look up to ask,
Where are we going?
They nose through the thin strip of grass
along the sidewalk, as fervent for new smells as I am.
Nobody is on the street, or on their lawn.
For years I have taken these two for walks past
the same white Spanish-style mansion
where we often hear a fragment of notes
from the same someone practicing the French horn:
an instrument known to signal the beginning
of marriages, kings, or simply the day; a silvery
lit comet streaking over the bright morning.
A quick burst of scales. We stop. Silence.
Then in the absence of notes, a longing continues,
resurfaces and shimmers there unheard;
the dogs and I lift our heads and look towards
as one might wait on someone’s unfinished sentence.
Suddenly the first passionate long notes begin
and I remember as we walk each other up
into the morning, what is limitless can begin in
the pale blue sky above the San Gabriel Mountains.
Sean Sutherland has had poems published in the literary magazines: the Meadow, Lime Hawk, Gravel, Prick of the Spindle, Blast Furnace, the 30th anniversary anthology; the Writers Studio at 30, and the Maine Review, for which he won honorable mention for their poetry prize in 2015. He was nominated for a Pushcart by the literary magazine Sleet in 2019, and recently had two poems selected in an anthology titled, Poetry for The Actor, A Guide to Deeper Truth.
Sean is a MacDowell Colony Fellow. He self-published a chapbook of short poems and haiku in 2010 entitled, Forever in the City, Forever Arriving, and has had plays of his produced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Maine. He is currently studying with Philip Schultz in his master class at The Writers Studio in New York City, and recently discovered the joys of camping in a tent!
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