KEENING/NIGHT, AFTER A CONCERT

             “To disclosures of the sleeping heart, / for air, for light.”
                  —Malca Litovitz, To Light, To Water

Rainwater drips through a crack in the ceiling
into a trashcan my mother placed at the foot
of the couch, and it rings out like a tuning fork.
I stand by the window peeking through 
broken blinds, watching a fawn dig its nose
around the brown grass of an early winter.

My father, folding the few clothes he owns, hums
an old Irish ballad from the bedroom – one he’s
long since forgotten the words to – and I think
back to the backwards-talk of my mother, short
evening before this one: Every time I hear you cry,
I sing. Oedipus, still bleeding from his feet, kills
Laius on the road to Thebes, and sometimes, while
on stage, I imagine I am standing in a slick of blood 
not knowing what it is I have done. 

Someone else has died and it isn’t my fault, 
but I cannot help thinking that this sickness 
unto death is exactly as Kierkegaard suggests.

Finished, he shuts the door, locking himself
in the dark again. Tomorrow the three of us 
will leave, vagrant crows to another murder,
but tonight I stand vigil outside, 
lamp-oil in the palm of my right hand. 
He whispers She deserved better
and I nod, though he can’t see.

Brendan Byrne is an incoming MFA student at Florida State University. His work has previously appeared with Hyacinth Review, Stone Circle Review, and The Shore Poetry, and is forthcoming from the Academy of American Poets. He is the winner of the Ralph and Doris Hansmann Poetry Prize awarded by the Academy of American Poets and the George E. Watrous Literary Prize in Poetry awarded by Hamilton College, from which he is a recent graduate.