“I think I’m tired of auditioning. / I’m not dancing for bread anymore.”
by SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY
I think I'm tired of auditioning.
I'm not dancing for bread anymore.
I'm not paying your fee.
Give the grant, the residency,
that place in a journal, that job
to someone else.
I'll be here under the Bodhi tree with Tu Fu.
He's sold a sheaf of poems.
He pours me a cup of wine
mixed with the glint of fisherman's lures.
He pours me a cup of sad songs
sung on a mountain pass.
At night, when I lie down in my cot
in our hut, I can hear him calling my name
to come out and dance.
He says my aloneliness
is long as a river.
He's drunk and silly
and counting characters.
Come out he says.
Stop being an orphan.
I open the door
but it is the door to the house
of sleep. I hear wind chimes
on the rising wind.
He's shouting me questions.
How can I write moon,
but mean mountain?
How can I write goose,
but mean grief?
Or a hanzi in the rain,
is it still the same
or something new
as it is washed away?
What is the page after?
Asks his voice of blurry ink.
AUDIO
Listen to Sean Thomas Dougherty read “Hanzi in the Rain.”
We nominated this poem for a Pushcart Prize.
Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of twenty books, including Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions (2023) and The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things, selected by Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs for the Jacar Press Full Length Book Poetry Prize. Dorianne Laux has called him “the gypsy punk heart of American poetry.” He works as a Caregiver and Medtech on the third shift along Lake Erie.
See more poems from Shō No. 3 (Summer/Fall 2023) by purchasing a copy.
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