by Tom Sheehan
It Might Not Be So Bad Living Here
Each room in this house
aches
with yesterday
under
wallpaper and wainscoting,
but
its beat winds as deep
as
termites you never see
(only
the talcum sawdust they leave,
thin as vapor trails, across
planking, on studs).
Front
hall, airy, secure behind
the
great studded door,
proves
me vulnerable to old songs,
some
whispered,
some not.
Stair
treads, oversize piano keys,
plink
and plunk past Februarys
and
Junes.
Each advance upward,
plays
hellos and good-byes
into
my pockets curves,
into
erogenic darkness.
Stair
nails, off a monger’s
dream,
still syncopate
squeeze
box music
as
they shimmy
out
of wooden suits
two
hundred years old.
Stair
rails, fashioned by
a
ripsaw, have been longer
guitared
and mandolined
than
playground fences,
strings
played in frequent rhythms,
more
going down dawn
than
going up bed.
Sons
Matthew and Timothy
boiled
in my arms
in
the witchery of
two
childhoods,
their fevered
cries
spiked into beams
bridging
the long kitchen.
I
can
hang
my hat on them yet,
or
herbs, random as straw fetishes,
to
dry above the fireplace.
Daughter’s
bad news at fifteen
fell
from her lips at dinner
in
the same room.
It was too near
Christmas
for tears. But subway
straps
of laughter hang from ax-
hewn
beams in these rooms, where
knocked-down,
flat, sad, lonely days
get
pulled upright, just the way
a
postman snaps up a rural red flag
helloing
the house.
Bare fall bespoken
Ballerina
leaf in my driveway
on a
single toe my favored
maple
let go of the night
before.
Moth
announcing October
at my window
pane. Is that
a gasp I
hear, or a sigh?
Follows
six points of a compass
or
snowflake pointing out
winter
is just north
of me.
Or do I
say,
winter is just,
north of
me?
All This Earth and Light
…and I
shall always touch you,
Mother
Earth, Rare Earth,
from all
vantages in these
flights
of uncounted time;
your
heart-shaking tempests
against
the incandescent eye,
silent
reach of sequoias
for your
partner in space,
soft
jangle of roots no swifter
than any
of blood, struggle
of moth
at October’s light,
vulture
toss incredibly high on
a
cross-wind and tumble-wait,
the
welcome mat at the foot
of all
these surroundings,
the pain
that’s all done
and that
yet to come:
and an
image in my ear
as soft
as a poem left
in an
old Latin diary
three
tiers of lava
once
took to bed.
Bio: Tom Sheehan served in 31st
Infantry Regiment, Korea, 1951-52, and graduated Boston College, 1956. Poetry
books include This Rare Earth & Other
Flights; Ah, Devon Unbowed and The Saugus Book. He has 20 Pushcart nominations, 350 stories
on Rope and Wire Magazine, work in Rosebud Magazine (5), The Linnet’s Wings (6), Ocean Magazine (8), and many internet
sites/print issues/anthologies including Nervous
Breakdown, Eskimo Pie, Faith-Hope-Fiction, Subtle Tea, Danse Macabre, Best of Sand Hill Review, Best of Frontier
Tales, Wilderness House Literary Review, MGVersion2Datura, Literary Orphans,
Eastlit, and Nazar Look, etc. His work has been published in Romania,
France, Ireland, England, Scotland, Italy, Thailand, China, Mexico, Canada,
etc. His latest eBook, an NHL mystery, is Murder
at the Forum, released January 2013 by Danse Macabre-Lazarus-Anvil Fiction
in Las Vegas, which treats of the Boston Bruins-Montreal Canadiens long-time
rivalry in a distinctively new slant. Two mysteries are scheduled for 2013; Death of a Lottery Foe and Death by Punishment. Other eBooks at
Amazon or B&N or Smashwords include the collections Epic Cures (with an Indie Award); Brief Cases, Short Spans, Press 53; A Collection of Friends and From
the Quickening, Pocol Press. His
newest eBooks from Milspeak Publishers are Korean
Echoes, nominated for a Distinguished Military Award, and The Westering, 2012, nominated for a
National Book Award by the publisher (with 7 collections completed and in the
publisher’s queue). Now in his 86th year, Sheehan writes 1000 words
a day.
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