A Poem For Tom Dougherty
Hands we'd watch stab
ashtrays or gouge jam
from toes or strangle a beer
now limply pose below
seersucker sleeves,
and you are again our dapper
bon vivant hitching your
brief life to your wife
and delivering a disquisition
on the rupee or riffing
comic skits, spraying
folks with mimicry and spit,
or shaving your wit's
pencil to script an animated
future in a body made
to hug the pole of home,
your mind free to roam
among ideas it warehoused.
You welcomed all arguments,
buried foes in slides of talk,
chatter, jabber, and flapdoodle,
poo-bah of armchair polemics--
We expected you to pitch
remission, let rip
a skein of artful speech,
use your rhetor's gab
to hoodwink mercy
from despotic tumors,
sell those cells your tissue's
Russian winter, scatter lesions
legion in your bones.
You hadn't fight
for what you couldn't charm.
We go by art or go.
You thought genius recall.
I say genius purifies
intelligence, jokes
on the doorstep of the void.
When the priest heard
your confession and lingered
in the hall, you said
OK, Father, now get the hell outta here.
Dan Giancola
September 2002