Opera Singer

--Ross Gay

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.