The Second O of Sorrow

Somehow, I am still here, long after transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared driving from town to town across Ohio selling things, the music where we danced just to keep alive. I now understand I was not supposed to leave so soon, half a century a kind of boulder that I’ve pushed up the hill & now for a moment, like Sisyphus I watch it roll. I walk through the snow. I breathe the dirty East Side wind pushing past the Russian church, the scent of fish & freighters & the refinery filling the hole in my chest—how many years have piled since I last stumbled out onto the ice & sat down to die. Only to look up at the geometry of sky—& stood to face whoever might need me—