Grief, without Figurative Language

My father shouts fuck you

At the wet grass. I ask

My brother what the weeping

Sounds like in his ears.

It sounds like weeping, he says.

Something startled & purple

Hops from tree branch

To tree branch above us.

If I don’t stare at the trees,

I will stare at my father

And I don’t want you

To see him like this.

I won’t presume

I know what the startled

Purple something is

When I call it bird.

Each thing I think to call bird

Has no idea what a bird is.

Each thing I think to call human

Would rather flutter away

From each moment it finds itself in.

If I were purple & startled,

I would only take my father’s

Weeping for song. Everything

Would be something else, for once.

Humans skirling their shrill music

From treetop to treetop. Birds

Burying other birds in boxes.

Matthew Tuckner is a writer from New York. He is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at NYU where he is Poetry Editor of Washington Square Review. He is the recipient of a University Prize from the Academy of American Poets and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, The Missouri Review, Bat City Review, New Ohio Review, Bennington Review, Image, Poetry Northwest, The Cortland Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among others.