I Took Beauty 

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

"When Butterflies – renounce their 'drams' –
I shall but drink the more!"
--Emily Dickinson

from the trees, plucked sapphires
& rubies from the evening sky.
Opal’s from the dark. I took the shimmer
of the breeze across the bay, in the morning
after working the third shift. I put that shimmer
in a plastic bag. I sold it like meth.
I’d walk up to strangers
& open the bag & say how much for this?
I mixed it into the soup
that was not sorrow. Here eat,
I said to my sick wife when soup
was all she could endure.
The trees in autumn cast their quilts
across the cold ground. & all that sings?
Finches & thrushes, grosbeaks
& wrens. Music growing
right out of the earth
like the jonquils & marigolds
the widow plants along the side
of her double-wide.
Or a bag of blood oranges
in the window
at the corner bodega. Outside two teenage girls
spoke in Spanish, sharing a cigarette.
I took their dark
eyed languorous youth, I mixed it with the fog
that hangs on the mooring bay,
with the high wail of the ore freighter’s horn,
with the downcast faces
waiting in the rain for the last bus
that will not arrive.
& you with your handful of stolen pills.
& you waiting for the needle’s plunge.
& you there at the back table
in the dim light of the last open bar in Ohio,
I see you too. Here, open this bag I say.
It tastes like a dram of butterflies one says.
It sounds, another says, scrunching his face
like the emptiness of streets 

full of wind-rustled receipts.