qarrtsiluni

Curry a new poem
with a wire brush

toss vanity aside
when you dare to

hit it two or more swipes
with the same scrub brush

your mother kept the kitchen
clean with, drag with a fine tooth comb

the kind she sought out nits
with when school was overrun

the way ant hordes might come
yet, fire ants from Brazil’s interior

the Amazon bone-dry
old wells besieged

silence the final
architect

by Tom Sheehan

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We talk fifty miles over wire, a mile
for each year since our eyes touched.
Legends still vibrate in your voice, fables,
story of a stray star, Atlantis provoked,
burst meadow beyond the hill, bedding down,
a tree counting the darkness, flower in a field
of rye. I remember a winter clean as salt,
memorialized snow banks, foreign country

of a couch thickly green and awkward
as landed amphibian, a blue wool skirt
of accordion pleats I blew smoke into,
my ear on its blue sky listening to stars
inside, eyes closed, mouth opened,
stretching, reaching, turning corners.

by Tom Sheehan

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(Jeff Eff’s Lily Pond Transit)

He declares hidden sets for me, pastel passage, same seat I have sat,
though different set of eyes, wondering where the spring, summer
and winter’s at. The hidden fires of fall have declined, flame without
smoke, though fire’s heart was born in stem, stalk and sprig in spring;
fall leaf and limb all flame, so cindered. Summer brazier on sunlit girl,
a sylph from diving board, who October wears a soft yellow sweater,
a skirt to match, who when the fire’s lit, thinks the fall’s the end of it.
Not sparks we hit, old ice houses in sheets of flame, wild sparks due
a mile away, heat enough for spring. Oh, yes, that’s it. Back to spring.
He thinks perhaps I see canoes slipping off pickerel-like from LeHavre
or New London’s watered pit, or a skater’s pond-wide whitened trail
on year’s first ice, twice black thunder leaping up the shore, and more,
the core of unheard music from olden noisy Odin’s Valkyrie with baton
underfoot, a blade honed by youth got on. Younger you and your crew
have followed arcs and marks leave visible the volts of thundering bolts.
Oh, Lily Pond’s never the same, takes aim for becoming done and gone
in seasonal’s phenomenon. Yet Jeff tells me what it is, how he recollects
his past from where he paints beside the pond, and mine, for all of that.

Painting by Jeff Fioravanti; poem and reading by Tom Sheehan

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Process notes

Tom: I’ve been thinking of collaborating. Take a peek at Qarrtsiluni. Perhaps a Lily Pond scene, our first common ground, might realize something nice.

Jeff: Let me see what I can develop. We’re on a short porch, submissions due by January 15th. Something of Lily Pond would be interesting. Let me see what comes.

Tom: I’ll keep a log of messages to support the effort, a piece of the submission. There’s free rein on the type of art. I wasn’t thinking of drawing you away from your work, but thought a pass at some graphic image or painting would do. It would take both sides of the coin to get what might be acceptable.

Jeff: I went to the pond yesterday, walking in from Central Street along the river, to get some reference material. Will continue to search and see what develops.

Tom: Much of what I remember is in the attached, “Diamond-faced Lily Pond.” When you have some time, take a look at it. Perhaps it’ll touch something in you.

Jeff: We share the same sentiments. Yesterday, as I walked past the river and the bridge no longer there, I remembered walking the woods to Billy Mitchell’s house or listening to highway traffic or staring at a winter evening’s sky. I tried to imagine my mother’s stories. The striking one is the Prentice boys saving her after a fall through the ice. I remember playing army with other kids, walking through after a football game, much later hiking to Martignetti Liquors and sharing a brew under the summer sky. I’ve watched the pond shrink and yet remain a treasure. Now I search for the right image for those thoughts.

Tom: (Saw Jeff’s pastel painting today, Lily Pond in fall colors, from below John Burns’s house. He will send me a pix. Lovely.)

Jeff: I shoot all my artwork with slide film, liking the way it captures images. Some background here: the painting was done in “en plein air” and is a pastel painting on watercolor board, toned to burnt sienna, of the area by the swing sets. I removed the houses in the background, trying for an original look. Rolling clouds were a challenge, occasionally blotting out the sun, playing havoc with the color scheme. This piece was created during the morning. The submission page doesn’t say what DPI or format the image should be. I’ve made this 300 dpi. The size of the piece is 7×9.

Tom: (Received email with the painting and was transported.)

Jeff: You’ve captured my thoughts, what I tried to catch in my painting, same seat, same scene, different but intertwined. I thought of trodden leaf, faded footsteps, seasons gone by, solitude, visiting old friends, sounds of hockey, plop of fishing lures, rustle of leaves, how we all eventually pass on, but still the seat and the place remain. I thought how you and I share a thread, tied together to this place. I thought of loneliness sitting there, like leaves lost from the trees. I think in many ways you’ve captured what I tried to capture. Different memories, different dreams, same place. I sit here grinning warmly, satisfied.

Apprehensive, she pushed open the door to take a final look, to check the Earth as far as she could see, to measure, to see if the gods she held were less than perfect. This was her world. The terror she found was in the measurement, in the time she had spent exploring dividend possibilities, the market’s surge, a late movie thought more boisterous than life itself, someone’s divorce, chicanery and outright theft, and a rigged election all too soon winked at. It came at her, the swift thought: our feet are caught in place: we are sucked into loam and hardpan and left for all of this rock; we are locked up tighter than the grip of stable Earth’s 17-degree axis. Escape is not here, or atonement for us. She kept saying “we,” kept herself aligned in that rare and human confederacy. There was assessment and agreement not known about; at that moment, in one half-held breath, hoe in hand, eyes gone to marble, a gaunt Filipino suddenly apprehends a minor shift in the Earth’s crust. It is the awed way she would know a tilt at a pinball machine. Beyond him, her, momentous Krakatoa, an island yet, proves to be imaginative again at the foot of history, and is no longer breathless. And deeper yet, farther away, thought to be buried out there in the fluffed accountabilities of Time, one long horse-tailed, red-eyed, incommutable comet picks up a little bit of left hand English… just for the hell of it.

by Tom Sheehan

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Lest the last light flee also,
and all shadows resort to themselves
in the vast but starless night,
we fed pine knots to the campfire,

miniature sparklers leaping red
parabolas and blue tangibles.
Though those small fires eyed up
in the pockets of our faces,

and each could tell the posture
and the bent of his comrades,
more by eye level and fire acceptance
than by any of a thousand words,

we felt that ghostly closeness
the old cave-drawn hunters knew,
the brace of union, solidarity’s
slow motion moving under skin,

a brothering darkness holding camp
like a briefcase about a document.
We fed stories to the faulting fire,
reams of stories, great breads

of stories a slice at a time,
thick, slabby, crusty mouthfuls
of what had brought us here,
our whole lives loafed up.

When a sound happened outside of us,
the owl’s calling attention, a croaker’s
voice setting up tent in the night
hawking his dominion of the pond,

a loon’s soliloquy sliding over hills,
the sad songs saxophones loose;
we accepted it as punctuation,
proper pause, the best of caesura.

We understood the leaf, knew the tree
hanging fire above our heads, the span
of it touching different days.
Even darkness can’t hide a tree.

But daylight, we knew, and white
water’s rapid turmoil can hide
the silver and red of trout,
can hide the mouth bitter for worms,

the string and foil of manufactured
flies and bare metal strikers.
Daylight hides the reddest fox,
the darkest owl, and campfire dreamers.

As we talk, red lights in our eyes,
dawn bulging behind timid leaves
like a poorly kept secret, we understand
there are only so many visits allowed.

This visit will be the last for one
or more, the odds having their say,
the threats as fluid as the stream
we dare bend our ankles in.

As we trespass, camped inland above
the water’s constant flowing,
we are reminded by earth’s quiet
of what the pause of being means,

we are merely a small glow here,
stars set off in a widening sky.

by Tom Sheehan

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:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

A mole tortures underground,
a host of bats above, like gloves,
hang to dry in dimmest light,
and in twisted byroads and

blossoming paths the termites,
carpenter ants and dust beetles
chew cuds of oak-hard sills.
Square nails, blunter than 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
at ultimate genuflection.

by Tom Sheehan

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:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

My turn had come;
Billy Pigg, helmet flown
lost, shrapnel more alive in him
than blood free as air,
dying in my arms.

Billy asked a blessing, none come
his way since birth. My canteen
came his font. Then he said,
“I never loved anybody.
Can I love you?”

My father told me,
his turn long gone downhill;
“Keep water near you, always.”
He thought I’d be a priest before
all this was over, not a lover.

by Tom Sheehan

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:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Oh, believe what you will, sir. I did not ask you to share my place. We leave one place and go to the next, such as ever has it. This morning we were in Lubichan, back down the track bed, amid the unbelievable flowers, and cherry blossoms raising havoc with all that’s holy in life, and the restraint such blossoms have on the heart, as if all cannot be believed, goodness being what it is. You know what goodness is, beneficence. The snowfall of them is illustrious, memorable, God himself frozen upon air, hanging out with the boughs and blossoms, oh resplendent in replacement each year. You think it not so, but do not wake this tired one to ask his version, his mind’s eye of the sights there; to ask what is the life of the bee as humble as his drone, yet see his architecture, his marvels, close your eyes and remember what he of little wings has done and great fear it might not get done. They are African bees, you know, fiery hearts come with near phantom wings taking up palace in spots where sweetness lingers, waits. Oh, sir, they are leopards at what they do. He knows his bees well, calls them leopards of the air.

Later we will be in Qat me Dere where the onions are and dark grapes sucking beauty out of earth and pouring it back. At the end of the valley beside a small house sits a remnant palm yielding a handful of dates each year, fearing also to let go its long grasp. Don’t wake him to ask what the fields of Qat me Dere look like, though it is a gift he brings to all places; how fields lay out like a woman her lover looks down upon in the new breath of dawn, how a river at evening collects all the silver coin a day has left hanging for the last legs of its miracle, how a smile takes a mouth from one place to another so bright the moon asks how.

I beg you, do not jostle him, do not jostle him. Ask no questions of him; he tires in his quick pursuit, so far reaching, so rich the details he brings dazzle you. Do not cough again like that, sir. It does not become you, trying trickery. Ruses be off! Let him be. Let him rest. Let his eyes, those glorious orbs, those rooted measurers of beauty and of beast, let them rest, have their short moments of peace, oh recoup their benefaction. Let him be until his call comes; he knows the where and when, and he tells me what scans the horizon and the smallest alley. Even now I know you move in the light or against the light, your shadow moves there, but he tells me what lingers there in the heart of a shadow. He sees what I do not but shares his gift with me. Oh, sir, do not rouse him yet. I beg of you, not yet.

by Tom Sheehan

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