Sean Thomas Dougherty Poetry

Bird Sighting in the Alleghenies Golden Shovel with Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain by Li Bai trans Sam Hamill

I wandered the steep path of the 

Mountain making notations of the birds. 

So many I could not name, nor have 

 

I ascertained how they vanished 

Into the leaves, I found a stretch of birches down 

From some great wind. I’ve come to the 

 

Mountain to greet it the way the sky 

Might meet the mountain, or now 

The way the slow rain greets the 

 

Mountain as I make it the last 

Steps up to camp, the dark clouds 

Roll in and the earth will drain 

 

The rain into ferns and flowers, away 

From minor things. What was it we 

Let sieve like water from our hands? I sit 

 

And ask the woods for a raptor. The crickets together, 

Stridulation of their violin legs, the 

Cicadas answer contrapuntal, only the mountain 

 

Does not speak as if it is the page and 

So I fade as if into a stream, all that is me 

Vanishes and what they find until 

 

The summer heat arrives is only 

The shape of a man who asked the 

Hawk if he could see the mountain 

 

Through its eyes and what remains.

Fata Morgana GS with Eugene Ruggle’s God 

I am arguing with God today at the lake after 

The storm waves rocked the beach last night waking

 

Any sleeping walleye, or sturgeon like the one I 

Found battered against the rocks—look 

 

My daughter shouted, a dead dinosaur down 

Near the break wall. The lake now still across 

 

As if a sheet of blue glass to the sky. We bent our 

Bodies to examine the sturgeon’s teeth, bodies 

 

Of small fish littered the beach. He 

Was old I said, see how big & long he is 

 

Nearly six feet. My five-year old daughter stared at this 

Fish trying to fix what it means to be dead, a search 

 

She asks of everything in this world. I 

Watch my daughter unafraid, & have 

 

I taught her to measure enough of hate, to 

Ask what of each stone, to ask how to make 

 

Amends to her mother. & all the sunken voices each 

Of them I hear on the lake as we walk this morning 

 

After the storm, the beach littered with carp for

The seagulls cacophonous chatter. I watch my 

 

Daughter’s face as she steps into the lake, hands 

Digging down into the sand, & picks up a flat rock like 

 

The ones my dead grandfather taught me to skip. Any 

Flotilla today is far from shore, a vague floating form 

 

As if above the horizon, as if apparitions, a gathering of

Hired perch boats,  casting out their lines with blindness—

The Recent Widow Golden Shovel with Otomo No Yakamochi trans by Sam Hamill

She flips the cards now 

By herself on the farm, nights the 
Leaves fall, the horses stalled, the season 

Of remembrance turns— 
The cards, the leaves, autumn 

Turns to freeze—breezes 
Now batter the panes. Crowing hens become 

The ones whose neck she swings. Winter’s 
Erasure covers the husked fields, bitter 

Is the taste in her gums, winds
Rattle the roof. What is one to 

Believe long after the hole is dug? A
Winter’s insomnia changes a man 

Into an absent thing, a woman now alone 
Flips the cards—the high screech of the 

Kettle’s boil, the great oaks bend nights 
The horses bray unsettled. She asks what will 

Sleep’s riddle unravel? And the old dead grow 
Young again behind her lids, sleeplessly 

In bed with him she rolls the whole night long.