Tom Sheehan

Poésie saisonnière 

 

 

Cutting Ice on Rapid Tucker’s Pond

             

It was always horses, dragging ice

to the wooden ramp obeying chugs

of the gasoline engine, their traces

often slack as the ice slid on ice

and thundered slowly and resolutely

from hard shore to hard shore. Up the

ramp the ice cakes lumbered, six feet

of Arctic beauty before the huge saw

found the blue and silver-red signals

sitting just under cover and waiting

to flash once more before sawdust

poured down on their frantic coloring.

 

I have no hard memory of the men

who steamed their labors on the hard pond,

who swore and drank coffee from bottles

whiskey belonged in, who went gloveless

and carefree and irreverent to winter.

Of their faces I have no memory, or names,

or how they spent their money downtown,

or where they trod for stitches when

the angry saw went haywire. I only know

they poled ice floes and huge cakes

with an indifferent touch, that they argued

long hours against the cold, the wind,

and the incessant need and desperate need

for sleep, that at zero degrees they mopped

brows with red kerchiefs large as sails.

 

They were the reverse itinerants

who came not for fruit but for ice drop,

who appeared one Saturday in December

and began to take away pieces of our pond,

huge rectangular chunks they hitched

up to horses shrouded wholly in steam,

their wide mouths rimmed by thick lips

often white with frost around the red tongues.

They wore soft felt hats, brimmed, jackets

so odd you could not find a mate, but boots

with horsehide laces, wide belts, and  looked

westward where the sun would set part ways

through the afternoon.

 

In latest July, ever,

you could find December deep in the icehouse

under the waves of orange sawdust still wet

with some of their sweat, a cool hideaway

to puff the stub of a cigarette, touch a breast,

play hide and seek for hours as winter

sprawled under our feet cold and foreboding

and nearly two floors high inside redan walls

two feet thick.

 

Mostly I remember the eyes

of a horse who plunged through the ice,

like great dishes of fear, wide and frightened

and full of the utmost knowledge. His front

hooves slashed away at the ragged rim of ice,

but could not lift him out, or leather traces

or ropes or sixty feet of chain, and when he

went down, like a boat plunging, huge bubbles

burst on the surface and a December afternoon

became quiet.

 

We stood transfixed, as if frozen

in the gray of that day, the itinerant workers,

other horses at rest, my shod friends, as Rapid

Tucker’s Pond began its disappearance under

the edge of yesterday.

 

 

 

Listening for Apples

 

They've all gone now,  

fire engine-red Macintosh,

under batter with cinnamon,

gone to day school via yellow

buses with brown-baggers,

or bruised to freckled

taupe and plowed

under for ransom

and this ritual.

 

Yet some odd sorts have had

life crushed out of them

for Thanksgiving cup.

 

Standing on a stiff lawn

downwind of winter, I drop first

cold moons of November into fractured

wheels of apple limbs and hear

bark beg away.

 

A pine ridge, thicker

than a catcher’s mitt, grabs

half  a wind riding off Monadnock

and squeezes wrenching cries,

that hang like wounded

pendants, on necks

of far, thin stars.

 

Deep in Earth, in a thermal

tube of its own mark, earthworms  

grow toward a rainbow trout

sleeping  under ice, waiting

to be heard, or an apple’s

last pips still on grass.

 

 

 

The Mercies Found in Light

 

Across this lightly-echoed pond

my night oars chatter up clouds

of mist as dense as the Milky Way.

Underneath, the fish disbelieve

the sudden warmth of their sky.

 

It is the darkness makes me love

all the mercies found in light.

Only the blind could love light

more, given one more chance;

a flash of pond face in their eyes,

 

with a star caught up inside.

If I dare to listen I hear an event

of deep fracture, a shore to shore

cracking underfoot, schismatic,

a round of forgotten artillery;

 

or my booted cutlery slashing

lines on the moon-white surface,

crackling an electricity that divests

thinnest wires. I am on the pond

past midnight; lo, there comes light.

 

Clarity speaking on cubes of air.

The wind has teeth at the back

of my neck. Only my left arch

is tired, and that from an accident

once on a night moving lightless.

 

I'm not blind as my father once was.

Light comes in spheres, or long, thin

lines, in the dusts of explosions,

flares, the cold air, slingshots

of dawn's quick pellets at my teeth;

 

what first comes as darkness dies,

and all the mercies we’ll ever know.

 

 

 

Tom Sheehan served in the 31st Infantry, Korea 1951-52, and graduated Boston College in 1956. Co-Editor of A Gathering of Memories, Saugus 1900 - 2000, Tom has published 28 books, has 30 Pushcart nominations, a Best of the Net award, two short story awards from Nazar Look for 2012- 2015, and a Georges Simenon Fiction Award. He has 30 Pushcart nominations, and five Best of the Net nominations (and one winner) and short story awards from Nazar Look for 2012- 2015, and a Georges Simenon Fiction Award. He was named Danse Macabre’s 2016 Writer-in-Residence.

 

Set in the legendary American West, Tom latest collection Jehrico ~ Many Stories of a Mexican Boy Making His Way in the Old West (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2017) is now available in quality paperback exclusively on Amazon.com.