Sean Thomas Dougherty

@stdougherty.bsky.social

1476 Followers 772 Following

Poet. Recent books with BOA Editions, Jacar Press. I work as a Medtech and caregiver, and teach part-time in the Western Connecticut State U MFA Program. Disability rights advocate, father, husband, obsessive Cleveland Cavs fan.

Winter Fugue

The world becomes singing or erasure? How my own father forgot my name. It was winter and he lived far away. He called me by his dead brother’s name. Did he know, too, I was his son? We misspeak all the time. And then our words float away in sound. I listen to the wind batter the house. How strong it blows off the lake. It reminds me of the television at night turning to static when I was young. First the national anthem, then the signal going out. I swore I could hear voices in the static. What did they say? I swear off the lake I hear my father saying his brother’s name. I step outside in shorts and a t-shirt and let it wrap itself around me. We are always trying to stay standing. I hear my father calling in the wind. If I lay down the snow would cover me like a shroud. I go inside and shiver. My father’s voice is everywhere. Even silence is a form of singing. It’s as if he’s standing right beside me, then he is gone as if he was snow melting on the ground.

After Visiting Hours

What is this grass as if the blades are strings that sing? I think this in the park outside the hospital. It is summer and the cicadas are whirring back and forth as dusk places her mauve tongue upon the trees. Soon the dark holds me, as I sit smoking on a bench. If I look I can see a window where you rest in a room hooked up to machines. A Junebug the shape of a cello lands on my arm, then departs—Helter skelters into the air, bumping into the streetlight and falling onto the sidewalk. I see the swarms of gnats in the streetlight’s halo and hear the soft hush of the moths. If I were to pray, there is no need to ask to enter the Temple. I am little more than an ember in the dark. We are so holy, small and frail.

Grief. The story of Easy, a small dog I imagine is named after Mosley's detective, crawls into the space left by Zinnia, burrowing into corners, against doorframes, beneath a house, in search of a phantom smell..

The Design by Michael Longley

Sometimes the quilts were white for weddings, the design
Made of stitches and the shadows cast by stitches.
And the quilts for funerals? How do you sew the night.

Franz Wright from his posthumous At His Desk in the Past published by Foundlings Press

First light. It's raining again in a dead language. Green. It's raining in a dead language. Green again. It's raining again in a dead language. Green. The empty and utterly silent house filled all at once with the sound of my name posed, in my young mother's voice before I finally slept...

Father

Now I know why we men
are born with broad shoulders:
to carry this long grief
of our father’s going
hoisting it to our shoulders
like a coffin.
But how will I carry you
to the woods
when you lived
past the years
when I was a working man
and could lift with ease
the spade, the stone.
Now what I’ve earned
is the shame
of the son
who pushes his father’s
wheelchair
knowing it is the chair
holding me up.

Plein-Air Sketch. A charcoal smudge lifts from a willow on the creek's far bank. It trails a scrap of awe from my throat. I have no other voice but that dark sheen's raw calling.

Picture of a car buried in over four feet of snow and shadow.

Thanksgiving by Sandra Gilbert.

Lord, as Rilke says, the years bear down to winter, past/the purification of the trees, the darkened brook./Only 4:45 AM and the sky's sheer black/clasps two clear planets and a skinny moon./as we drove quietly from the airport/ the last kid gone.

you fifty years. //Meanwhile there are kites and church/a winking light in ribboned fog// tax breaks, bone grafts/skeins of jazz, and in-between/each in-between the story/of your first wool suit: you//wore it once and passed it on.

When a hand meets a door/ one expects that it will open--/the hand, not the door. /The door is closed forever.

Like a horse whipped amid a chorus of laughter a woman standing near the top in the shadow of her shadow. An Erasure from James Joyce's The Dead