Opera Singer

Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief

that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil

dragging from my neck as I swim

through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos,

which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry

snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion

worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say:

I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means.

And in my sadness I’ll walk to a café,

and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket

as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No,

I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness

in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise

when my self-absorption gets usurped

by the sound of opera streaming from an open window,

and the sun peeks ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl,

and this singing is getting closer, so that I can hear the

delicately rolled r’s like a hummingbird fluttering the tongue

which means a language more beautiful than my own,

and I don’t recognize the song

though I’m jogging toward it and can hear the woman’s

breathing through the record’s imperfections and above me

two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch

leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face,

staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee

and relief I run down the street, and I forgot to mention

the fifty or so kids running behind me, some in diapers,

some barefoot, all of them winged and waving their pacifiers

and training wheels and nearly trampling me

when in a doorway I see a woman in slippers and a floral housedress

blowing in the warm breeze who is maybe seventy painting the doorway

and friends, it is not too much to say

it was heaven sailing from her mouth and all the fish in the sea

and giraffe saunter and sugar in my tea and the forgotten angles

of love and every name of the unborn and dead

from this abuelita only glancing at me

before turning back to her earnest work of brushstroke and lullaby

and because we all know the tongue’s clumsy thudding

makes of miracles anecdotes let me stop here

and tell you I said thank you.

Copyright Credit: Ross Gay, "Opera Singer" from Bringing the Shovel Down. Copyright © 2011 by Ross Gay. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011)