Poems by Tom Sheehan
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After Apples, Listening
by Tom Sheehan
Tom lives in a house built in 1742 about 200 feet from the Saugus River in the Saugus River Watershed bounding 900 acres of the Rumney Salt Marsh and 450 acres of a wetland, Reedy Meadows.
They have all gone now,
the fire engine-red Macintosh,
under batter with cinnamon,
gone to day school
on yellow buses
with brown-baggers,
or bruised to a freckled
taupe and plowed under
for ransom and ritual.
Some have had the life
crushed out of them
for Thanksgiving cup.
Standing on the stiff lawn
downwind of winter,
I drop the first cold
moon of November
into a fractured wheel
of apple limbs
and hear the bark
beg away.
A pine ridge,
thicker than a catcher’s mitt,
grabs half the wind
riding off Monadnock
and squeezes out
wrenching cries that hang,
like wounded pendants,
on necks
of far, thin stars.
Deep in the Earth,
in a thermal tube
of its own making,
an earthworm grows
toward a rainbow trout
sleeping under ice
and waiting to be heard,
or the last of an apple’s pips
still this side of the grass.
© Tom Sheehan
An Infantry of Stars
by Tom Sheehan
From Canary Spring 2011
An infantry of stars
Swarms the slow sky
Wide as a Vicksburg
Field between shots.
The guidon ripples
The slow torment
Of deep passage
Just beyond Polaris.
Near giant Orion’s
Eastward shoulder,
A torchbearer pops
An impetuous gleam.
Small encampments,
Sometimes sevenfold,
Tighten their ranks
In bright bivouacs.
Others, loners and post
Guards, circle wide
Circles like the dog
Star Procyon hunting.
This vast array
Does not appall me,
Though I diminish
Before its deployment.
I have been told,
In good faith,
That many of these
Stars are dead,
But we know their shinings,
Like old soldiers,
Long-gone, cement
Themselves into statues,
Dim ribbons and old medals
Whose scriptures fade at sun
And slowly, gram by gram,
Inch toward minerals and memory.
Beneath my feet
This veteran Earth slips
Into the far side
Of another’s telescope.
© Tom Sheehan
Dowser on the River
by Tom Sheehan
From Canary Spring 2013
Downriver a sudden
wash spills grubs, white
worms, into the quick rush.
Stones, too, hurl
into the fray, like infantry
and horse soldiers out of bush.
The rain is gone
over-hill half a day
and aches its echo on the earth.
This, of course,
is my own war, this drive
to be alone, separatist seeking
shadows of the pine,
the cool, dark cells of old trees
flattening like choice rooms by the banks,
and the phantom foe
sleek as a jet under surface.
He turns to watch my boots stumble
on the rock skelter
laced with lichen and mossed
strains. If he has laughter, it floats
away faint as photographs
at the back end of an old man’s
mind. I trust that he neither laughs
nor cries in his world,
that once he noses upstream,
feels the power gauging his flanks,
knows the message
burning like new stars
in the sanctity where his eyes dwell,
he will forget why I
am in this shadowed recess:
that a secret spawning calls us both
from the center
of the earth, the rhythm’s merge
divining where the river starts itself.
© Tom Sheehan
Rubble, Barn Style
by Tom Sheehan
From Canary Summer 2013
Dust from last century
settles deeper, tattles
tales when jammed open
by a heavy broom, a toe
dragged through lifelines,
the demise of contours.
Barns this size, kneed
in the groin by January
storms, wet coughs of April,
August retreats from fire
when gummed capillaries
draw back to old dowsing
grounds, always show age,
the way blue ribbons are worn.
Sun, even a dish-bright moon,
occasionally a star if you’re
still in your tracks, breathless,
hoist themselves where nails
also fell to mines of earth.
But it is here that iron
and wood trade final secrets.
Under rust’s thickest scab
the metal keeps its black shine;
abrade it with rock and stone
and the line of light leaps out,
like the flesh of wood flashes
its white mysteries orbiting
marks of lunar growth.
A mole tortures underground,
a host of bats above like gloves
hang to dry in the dim light,
and in twisted byroads
and blossoming paths the termites,
carpenter ants and dust beetles
chew the cud of oak sills, risers
an ash released to two-hand saw,
and green pine checked, stippled,
full of eyes where knots let go.
Square nails, blunt as cigars,
suddenly toothless, a century
of shivering taking its toll,
shake free as slow as worms.
For all the standing still
there’s action, warming, aging,
the bowing of an old barn,
ultimate genuflection.
© Tom Sheehan
Saugus on the Tidal Run
by Tom Sheehan
From Canary Fall 2013
What of all the spills that ache here --- upland dosage where the delta’s done and settling its own routines, the near immeasurable transfer of land and other properties of the continent chasing down Atlantic ways, shifting nations and cities from directly underfoot, moving towns along the watershed, oozing territories.
Oh, how I loved the river feeding the ocean.
I have plumbed the Saugus at the river mouth, found the small artifacts of its leaning seaward, tiny bits of history and geography getting muddied up against the Atlantic drift, suffering at tide’s stroke, roiling and eddying to claim selves, marveling at a century’s line of movement, its casual change of character, its causal stress and slight fracturing under ocean’s dual drives, the endless pulsing tide and the overhead draft of clouds bringing their inland torment and trial, land and loam and leaf running away with the swift sprinters of water, the headlong rush of heading home like salmon bursting upstream for the one place they can remember in the chemistry of life, impulses stronger than electricity, smells calling in the water more exotic than Chinese perfume.
The flounder, sheaving under the bridge at the marsh road, pages of an un-sprung book, one-eyed it always seems, hungering for my helpless and hooked worms, sort over parts of Saugus in this great give-away, and nose into the extraneous parts that were my town, my town.
“Listen,” my father said to me, his eyes dark, oh black during a whole generation, “for a sound whose syllable you can’t count up or down, for what you might think is a clam being shucked, a quahog’s last quiet piss on sand, a kelp bubble exploding its one green-stressed overture.”
He talked like that when he knew I was listening, even at ten years of age.
He wasn’t saying, “Listen for me,” just, “Listen for the voices, the statements along Atlantic ritual, every driven shore, rocks sea-swabbed, iodine fists of air potent as heavyweight’s, tides tossing off their turnpike hum, black-edged brackish ponds holding on for dear life, holding a new sun sultry as anchovies … all of them have words for you.”
I hear that oath of his, the Earth-connected vow all the sea bears, the echoes booming like whale sounds, their deep musical communication, now saying one of his memorials, “Sixty-years and more, I feel you touch Normandy’s sand, measuring the grains of your hope, each grain a stone; and I know the visions last carved in June’s damp air.”
“Oh,” he’d add, “you sons, forgotten masters of our fate.”
Deepest of all, hearing what I didn’t hear at ten, but hear ever since, the hull-hammered rattling before rescue from the USS Squalus, 60 fathoms down off Portsmouth, the sound and the petition count never fading; three quarters of a century of desperation and plea hammering in my ears.
Say it straight out: “Some were saved and some were lost. That is a memorial.”
The eels squirm and fidget on Saugus farmlands, pitch-black bottom land gone south with rain and years, gutter leanings, great steel street drains emptying lawns and backyards and sidewalk driftage into the river below black clouds. The worn asphalt shingles on my roof yield twenty-five years of granules, and now and then tell that story inside the house.
A ninety-year old pear tree shudders under lightning and offers pieces of itself as sacrifice to the cause, dropping twigs, blasted bark other lightning has tossed into the soft footing, the grayed-out hair of old nests, my initials and hers and the scored heart time has scabbed up, dated, pruned, becoming illegible in the high fancy of new leaves and young shoots. There, too, went my father’s footprints in one April storm, washed away in late afternoon as he lay sleeping in that tree’s hammock; and grease off my brother’s hands from his Ford with nine lives hanging on a chain-fall; and across the street a neighbor’s ashes spread under grapevines and pear tree an August fire later took captive in dark smoke I still smell on heavy summer evenings.
This is my word on all of this, this act of love, this adoration:
It is where the river’s done and has the yearling host, this boy’s lonely boast he’s lived the night at water’s edge, on safety’s ledge, on Atlantic side leaning inward from mighty crest and wave where fishermen become brave. I know panoramic view, gulls’ endowment, how fish shapes call them from Earth’s face, that spinning race about the sun and those who dare the seaward fare and spell of salted lung when a boy’s hung between the sunlit surface and a pinch of salt, who knows twisted souls at sea, sweet misery of warming sand, a hand not forgotten far from land where flotation guise reflects on lower skies. I know how water marks horizon’s dwelling where dark stream and ocean meet twice in flow of bayside surge and ocean merge loses out in river’s downhill push, losing lush things like gravel I have trod, and the locks and board holding back my river horde.
Oh, believe … I have come up by image from the sea in other times, by overhand, by curragh, by slung-sailed ship of oak, afloat a near-sunken log; have crawled sandy edges of the bay, looked back at waters’ merge and flow, found the river’s crawl reversed where floating parts are nursed, toting redwing nests the winds abuse, good ground the rain in swift return hauls down the river … Saugus on the loose.
© Tom Sheehan
Still Water Covenant
by Tom Sheehan
From Canary Fall 2010
Bowed out before me, slack green
where ripples wash each other
in slow torment, air too long foul
and fish bellied up against the sun
in my savage memory, Rapid Tucker's
Pond sleeps where the canoe plies on.
I am bare movement in the stillness,
a slow energy across swift despair
of water feeding only twisted roots
of pines, scorched alders, reeded haven
for a lone pair of red-winged blackbirds.
Death rattles all about me, canned bones
shaking as if worn lowly on the gunnels,
disease as memorialized as statuary,
illness captured like a held breath.
The vile green liquid carpet staggers
outward from brighter reflections,
the old ripples of a once-tossed stone
moving momentary photographs to mind;
spiking the pond with vibrant trout
silver and red and stone-crushed blue
all along their speckled undersides,
watching the aerial elegance of frogs
where bass bombs burst in weeds,
lazy pickerel flotillas idling shallows
with the sun announcing further shadows
on the sand, then midnight ice caught
as darkness inside of diamond stones.
No sicker than I, this pond, torn
and ripped on my insides, lament
riding its frail blessings in harsh song,
memory stabbing with the other days
relentless as forgotten gunfire,
cursing acid rains and dark clouds,
upland spillage secretive and sly
as armed infiltrators, underwater pipes
neighbors bury after dark, beavers'
departure, April morning silences.
All this death draws promises, half oaths
about this once-hallowed place, Earth-pond,
my Earth though too soon mated with it,
too long interred where long dowsers reach,
Earth that is the substance of my body,
where the unseen mold plays its waiting game.
The slayer moves among us, prowling,
claiming land and sea and air channels,
touching with his dread hand the least of us
and rough edges of the tumbling Atlantic.
Rapid Tucker's Pond dies, then Lake Erie,
and the Pacific sits fattest of targets.
In this morning's silence, even birds abed,
I swear I will not yield easily, or first.
© Tom Sheehan
The Catch of the Day
by Tom Sheehan
From Canary Summer 2018
Three of us for dozens of years were tight as a fist. No one could break us up, and a few had tried that on a few futile occasions, even when we gentlemen were fly fishing on one or more of the local streams, dawn afloat, May alive after a harsh winter and a tough early spring. Patterns were set betwixt us, like specialties of the house or garage or personal workshop, toil and turn at obstacles and unfinished tasks were before us who by each one's choice in life's work had brought the gifts of ideas and applicable and talented hands to extend those gifts. For each one of us possessed odd and different talents in electrical, mechanical and brute strength applications and peculiar other interests like coin and stamp collecting, scrap book organization and minimal, but touching artwork by a loving touch, family interest passed down from a parent or an older sibling.
But the sea, above all things on the face of the earth, called us as if we belonged to it ... dipped, doused, and blessed in it and by it by fathers that we assumed had been so dipped, doused and blessed, kind of a chain of command, dare, do and get done.
Eddie’s call came at 4:00 in the morning. His whisper, not wanting to wake his wife, said “Great storm at sea last night. Want to check the beach?” There was a stretch in his voice, a need seeking its own echo, a call for companionship ... even if there were no payback. I could picture him silent in his domain, five boys still asleep, his rugged little frame moving soft as a shadow, not a speck of alarm about his person.
An awakening grace also said it was Saturday. That’s all it took in the darkness beside my wife, turning, stretching, eyes blinking, rolling over, going back to sleep. She knew it was Saturday too, her children sleeping as well.
Once before, after a storm out on the Atlantic, we had found a dozen quahogs at Nahant Beach, picked them off the sands with an assortment of sea clams on the mile of curving beach along the causeway linking islanded and insular Nahant to the City of Lynn. For years we had swum at Nahant Beach, had evening cookouts, and watched the girls for long, hot summers measuring how their beach wear changed with the years ... sometimes within a week of mutual attractions.
The beaches and the rivers had their own calls.
In silence, in darkness until I reached the kitchen, I left a note for my wife: “Storm at sea last night. Will be at Nahant looking for quahogs to stuff and bake. Eddie called. Ray and I are going.”
The morning was special. A summer nip climbed in the air, saying, as ever, that Saturdays are full of expectations. Salt was finding its way inland. Some of it , we knew, was imagined, manufactured by similar minds and hungers, but salt has a reasoning power that seems to say, "Why not?"
We did not bring baskets or bags, but hurried to view the scene, not to be left out of the treasure yield the storm and Father Atlantic might have tossed onto the beach. Each of us possessed his own picture of the find, the magnitude or the false call of a storm falling short of an entire beach. On the way, in Ray’s car, an old green Studebaker that smoked and made strange noises, we talked about grinding them up for baked stuffed quahogs for munching during TV hockey games, or for freezing them, after being ground up, to use in Thanksgiving turkey stuffing. Some would be earmarked for adding to the menu of a corn and lobster clambake classic in one yard or another, and a large copper pot loaded with seaweed sitting atop two camp stoves ... in some selective site we had not yet discovered. Romance comes in many forms, like expectation, delivery, consumption.
There was no traffic in our five-mile ride to Nahant, the sun just burping over the horizon, Europe halfway through its day, hastening, beckoning, saying goodnight sooner than later. And we were beach-bound. We would meet Europe and the Atlantic, and whatever they would bring our way, in a long curve of sandy land.
We hit the beach, as we drove onto the causeway, and were stunned. There in front of us was the mother lode. As far as we could see, along the strand, the beach was littered with quahogs and sea clams, all sizes, all thicknesses, spread out as vast as spilled riches from a kingly chest. In joy and surprise we screamed at each other for not bringing baskets or plastic bags to carry off the loot. Hunger tantrums made way on us; famous past meals in the mix, coming gatherings with a collection of friends not fazed by our riches, but admittedly jealous of the find. The forgotten taste of baked stuffed quahogs in one of our back yards came back in a hurry, the flames low and unhurried, the tastes higher than the hog's. Tabasco sauce, a glass of wine or a glass of beer, a kiss from the wild Atlantic was a kiss from a cook parading about like a chef at a gala seldom reached.
Scrambling for anything to carry Atlantic's loot back to the trunk of the car, we found an old pair of wading boots and two old work jackets. We rushed up and down the beach, filling all the limbs of those boots and the jackets, lugging them to the car. We filled the trunk and then the back seat. It was exhausting work, running back and fro, waiting for the hungry crowd to come over the horizon, to get their share, as if Europe itself had salted the sea for us, fed the long journeys for our treat.
We thought the morning was as complete as it ever could be, the three of us, Pine River fisherman, trout fisherman, who were mesmerized by sea food … cod, tuna, haddock, lobster, clams, shrimp, sea clams, quahogs, the catch of the day.
But, in another wake-up call, another step in this grand day, another surprise beyond surprise, along the paved walk of the strand, on an old-fashioned skinny-tire bicycle, going slow, studying the beach, came an elderly gent. To say he wore a shirt and tie, on a Saturday, and a blazer, would say little, for he came to us as if he was actually scripted for us out of an old Adolph Menjou movie, or a Fred Astaire dance special. He sat regally, properly, thin and upright on the seat, seams in his trousers as though but minutes before those seams had been pressed by a steam iron into implacable place. His shoes shined like new pennies. On the bottoms of those pant legs, the cuffs folded as neat as table napkins for the royal meal, a pair of old fashioned pants clips were carefully set in place as if measured for the fit. Something told me, in an unknown voice, magisterially, soft but magnetically, that he was on the same hunt we were on, but a whole lot neater by long habit. We asked him if this was his regular morning constitutional, from insular Nahant back behind him for a mere mile, to pedal the causeway out and back, to keep fit what was an 80 year old body, at least.
“Not really,” he said with a soft smile, a gentleman speaking. “My wife, Mirabel, we’ve been married almost 60 years, sent me out to see if I could find two or three quahogs she could stuff and bake tonight, in the late evening most likely. Oh, she had a light in her eyes, she did, a proper light, and I know she’d find a nice bottle of wine secreted some place in the house, and we’d have ourselves a grand evening. Rich salt air, a little wine, music from a favorite old opera right from The Met or from La Scala itself, and baked stuffed quahogs. It can’t get any better than that." He shook his head very lightly, and added, "It mustn't” He smiled the soft smile again. He was not out to beat anybody in any part of this small world.
The old man, we believed forever after, had found Nirvana and Utopia.
Ray, quick to spread his wealth, opened the trunk of the car. Quahogs, like huge coins, spilled onto the pavement. We filled the little basket sitting across the handlebars of the old gent’s bike. A dozen quahogs, loaded with promise, sat like the riches of the Orient.
The air was special. Saturday was special.
Eddie said, “Do you want us to follow you home and make a special delivery, a big delivery.”
“Oh, dear, no,” the old gent said. “That would only spoil it.”
To a man we knew what he meant.
We never saw him again.
We never saw the beach littered like that again.
We never made that trip again, time having its way, and mortality.
But I think about it often, and all the players on that special Saturday.
© Tom Sheehan
The Day Titanic Drowned
by Tom Sheehan
We were sitting on empty nail kegs next to his icehouse on the edge of Lily Pond in Saugus, Doc Sawyer and me, talking about everything and nothing in particular. It was his way of communicating. In his gray felt hat, shirt collar buttoned but with no tie, Mackinaw open so I could see red suspenders clasped at his paunch, Doc always had time to talk to kids, dropping lore and legend in his wake. “Where you're sitting right now, son, is the geographical middle of our town. It's right under your feet, or,” and he chuckled, “under your butt.” I felt special, being ten years old, on the inside where real data was concerned.
He was full of tidbits like that. “Bazooka Bobby Burns scored the first touchdown on that field when it was dedicated this past fall,” he said, pointing across Appleton Street to Stackpole Field, re-dedicated in 1938, “and young Jackie Harrington scored the second one. You watch that young one now.” He could make declarations, too.
It was Saturday. It was cold again, as it had been for a good spell, and the ice cutting would begin today, the temperature holding below freezing for more than a week. On the pond the ice was over fourteen inches thick, thick enough to hold the small army of men soon to be on it. Morning light fell gray yet vivid across the face of the pond, and it raced off toward the island in the middle and the Turnpike beyond. It was a long skate from one end of the pond to the other. Some skating days it paid to bring lunch.
Crows were sending brittle messages to each other out across the frozen surface, over the cliff on Cliff Road, into the woods. Now and then I could hear the tires on a truck as it ran north to Maine or Canada on the Turnpike. Sounds ran over the pond as though they came through a funnel. Old Doc turned as he heard hoof beats on the pavement of Summer Street running alongside Stackpole Field. Like a drummer playing games, I thought.
The biggest horse I had ever seen in my ten years came down the street, and Mitch Crocker was guiding him with a set of long reins, not snapping them but laying them easy on that great back. That horse was so big it even made Doc stand up and take off his hat. He shook his head, light bouncing off his glasses, and said, “Where'd you come on him, Mitch? Win him in a game?”
Horses in those days always awed me, fearsome things, huge as boulders, with great teeth and hooves like catcher's mitts. Horses hauled milk wagons, and honey wagons, and now in winter the clumsy snow plows behind them, dragging on their muscles, calling on their hearts. This one with Mitch Crocker was a tower of an animal, dark chestnut in color. His teeth were yellow and enormous and now and then he'd pull his lips back to show them to you. Steam pulsed from his mouth like any other great engine of a thing.
“What's his name?” Doc said, laying a hand on the rippled neck, rubbing that fur coat smoothly, easily, talking another way, something closeted in his voice.
“I call him Titanic,” Mitch said, “though I don't expect him to answer none. “He don't happen to answer to any name unless he downright feels like it. So, names don't make any difference and one's as good’s another.”
“For the ship?” Doc said. The horse's eyes were a mix of lime green and yellow, and deep, as if he were reading my mind. I figured he had already read Mitch's mind. I looked away from those eyes.
“As well as any I could pick on, specially for size,” Mitch said. “It'll do until another comes along. This boy can take care of all your hauling today, Doc.” He patted Titanic on his broad chest. “Drag all the floes into place, get them up on to the ramp so's they can be cranked up and stored. Yes sir, do it all.”
For a few hours that Saturday I watched the strange army of itinerant ice cutters saw and chink up the ice of Lily Pond, saw Titanic with long chains hitched to his leather gear easily haul the huge cakes of ice to the slabbing point and transport up the chain-driven ramp to where they'd get buried under shavings and saw-dust. Easily and steadily he worked, the steam puffing in great clouds from his mouth and circling around his head like halos. Now and then, as if to reaffirm who was really in charge, he'd throw off a head-shaking command and bring attention to himself.
Never a sound came from his throat.
Throughout the morning old Doc Sawyer kept nodding his head, admiring that animal as if he'd never seen his like before.
Noon crawled toward us, still cold, still steamy about that great beast. Then the heart leap came and a fearful noise, a renting, a crashing. It was just before lunch when Titanic went down. I heard a yell, a scream, the unforgettable thundering noise as though a crack was going to sprint the length of the pond, and Titanic was in the water. In the deepest part of the pond. His legs thrashed at the ice, breaking off huge chunks, the noise like an enormous ice machine at work, like an icebreaker in frozen Boston Harbor I’d seen before. The ice under my feet shook.
The day stood still for me.
I'd never before seen a huge creature like him frightened, and his eyes said just that. They were like baseballs. Yellow-green baseballs, all wet and frosty, with tunnels behind them and all kinds of talk in them. He made sounds, too, desperate sounds down in his lungs, deeply bellowed sounds inside that huge canister of a chest and they came blurting out of his mouth along with the torrent of steam. Could have been grenades going off beneath the water.
Everybody leaped to grab chains and ropes, to pull that thrashing and ponderous beast out onto the surface of the pond. But the ice kept breaking under his hooves. And he tired and sank two or three times and came back up thrashing and kicking more, and the steam rising off his great back. The chains snarled and came caught up in ropes, and in his legs, I suppose. You could see the lines of them somehow get shorter and shorter. There was no slack in them at all. None of the men could steer or drag that ship of a horse onto the top of the ice.
Mitch Crocker, just before Titanic went down for the last time, dropped a length of chain from his bare hands. He blew into his cupped hands and tried to rub them. He was wet all over, dark stains growing across his clothes. His thick fur hat bobbed in the water. Then a last bubble came circling around it where Titanic's lungs had let go for the final time.
Doc Sawyer put his arm around Mitch's shoulders. “That was some animal, Mitch. I'm really sorry for your loss.” I remember thinking it was like standing in line at the funeral parlor. Everybody sad, their heads down, striking for one correct word, a passable word. Cold and quiet were twin elements around us.
In the water all the bubbles had gone.
Then, about five minutes later, itinerant ice cutters in odd clothes and knee-high leather boots and kids and on-lookers still standing quietly on the ice, about ten or twelve feet of chain, yet laying out on top of the ice as though remnants of a disaster, just slipped off the edge link by link and went down out of sight. Perhaps one last lunge by that great horse.
When all the noise was made about the movie of the same name in these recent years, I thought about the other Titanic going down. I remembered how quiet it was after, how cold, the last hunk of chain, getting dragged off the ice, still making a connection.
© Tom Sheehan