Thomas Sheehan

Hawk Performance

In apt darkness chasing him,
in mountains where great gorge,
lake and river give up daylight
with deep regret, his shadow hangs
itself forever, the evening hawk
gliding mute as a mountain climber
at grade, leaving in our path
the next hiker's awed-quick silence,

stunned breath, second look upward
on frozen eyes and drifting wings
caught forever. From Yesterday he
comes, from Far Mountains only Time
lets go of, under wings steady
as scissors as thermals gather,
not sure the joy is his, or ours.
So much light falls down from him,
from wing capture, from his endless

fleeing of the globe's universal
gravitation, and our genuflection,
we feel prostrate. World-viewed
incandescence, sun under his wings
with quick volley, slipping through
a hole in the sky, lilting the
soon-gray aura without a sound,
the evening hawk performs above us.

To look in his eye would bring
back volcano, fire in the sky,
a view of the Earth Earth has
not seen yet, Krakatoa lit
a second time, or one wayward
comet turning inward on a dime
just for performance sake.

CP

Thomas Sheehan’s latest books are Brief Cases, Short Spans and From the Quickening. A collection of cowboy stories, Where the Cowboys Ride Forever, is now in the hands of a western publisher. His work has also appeared in many print and online publications. Sheehan has several Pushcart nominations and won the Georges Simenon Award. His web site is here .

Thomas Sheehan

Hands

Somehow hands carry off
hard memories of handshakes.

They find solitude in pockets
and dark burials of lint.

Often they surprise thighs
surprising them with muscles.

late afternoons, at brick labor,
they're apt to sneak home for rest.

Shovel handles give them polish;
pick handles, proud rind of callus.

They remember pine resin, horseshoes,
how crowbars throw selves backward.

Left hand has intimate recall
of fastball's inside threat;

right hand for a first stick shift
on a '46 black Ford convertible,

moments, it seems, after war was gone.
They lock magic behind another's back.

hands give the sleight of messages
hanging passive as window weights.

They promote scabs and resolute scars,
toss knuckles out of position,

meet acquaintances abruptly;
flesh of lovers is a longer row.

when they fold finally, one on top,
nothing else is left for chance.

—From This Rare Earth & Other Flights

CP

Tom Sheehan’s latest books are Brief Cases, Short Spans and From the Quickening. A collection of cowboy stories, Where the Cowboys Ride Forever, is now in the hands of a western publisher. His work has also appeared in many print and online publications. Sheehan has several Pushcart nominations and won the Georges Simenon Award.

Thomas Sheehan

Korean Echoes

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.

—First appeared in Qarrtsiluni

CP

Thomas Sheehan’s latest books are Brief Cases, Short Spans and From the Quickening. A collection of cowboy stories, Where the Cowboys Ride Forever, is now in the hands of a western publisher. His work has also appeared in many print and online publications. Sheehan has several Pushcart nominations and won the Georges Simenon Award. His web site is here.

Behind the Retina
Thomas Sheehan

Just behind the retina,
hidden in a cluster, is a little room
with a secret door and passageways
and key words other
than Sesame.

If you’re lucky enough
to get inside that room at the right
time, there’s ignition, there’s light, there’s a flare;
now and then there’s pure incandescence
like a white phosphorous shell
detonating, the core room
of memories, the bank

holding everything
you’ve ever known, ever seen,
ever felt, spurting with energy.
The casual, intermittent presences
you usually know are microscope-beset,
become immediate. For those glorious

moments the splendid
people rush back into your life
carrying all their baggage, the Silver Streak
unloaded, Boston’s old South Station
alive, bursting seams,
tossing images.

CP

Thomas Sheehan’s latest books are Brief Cases, Short Spans and From the Quickening. A collection of cowboy stories, Where the Cowboys Ride Forever, is now in the hands of a western publisher. His work has also appeared in many print and online publications. Sheehan has several Pushcart nominations and won the Georges Simenon Award. His web site is here.

Lines My Father Left for Me
Thomas Sheehan

Crow a little bit when you’re in good luck;
Own up, pay up, and shut up when you lose.

Fishing is the great solace in sports. It’s for the mind,
not the hook. It’s the time when you measure wins

and losses in the truest angle of all, a slant of unbearably
beautiful sunlight through morning’s alder leaves, water’s

whisper of confidence on rocks you think you can hear
later in the night, the pointed miracle of a trout beating

you at his game, letting you know the wins and losses
do come and do pass by, even standing still.

It’s like the game of golf or the game of pool,
the green is highly coincident. And early in sports,

at the edge of my first failure, marked by the touch
of his hand on my shoulder: You come into this life

with two gifts, love and energy, and words and sports
are going to take both of them for all you’ve got.

I think his heart remembered a loss, his knees their pain.
When they took his leg off, the pain did not leave him.

CP

Thomas Sheehan’s latest books are Brief Cases, Short Spans and From the Quickening. A collection of cowboy stories, Where the Cowboys Ride Forever, is now in the hands of a western publisher. His work has also appeared in many print and online publications. Sheehan has several Pushcart nominations and won the Georges Simenon Award. His web site is here.

Picture Postcard from Fenway Park

Thomas Sheehan

High in the right field stands,
chaired with wheels, knowing
he will never feel the grass
beneath his feet, never feel
the chalk lines go like clouds
under foot, never face a foreign
pitcher, or dare a steal, a boy
of bright eyes and sad legs
lets go; he tries to measure
the speed a fastball has,
the gyrations of a knuckleball
or a moon-ball dipsy-doodler.

Only when he feels the weight
of his father's tears does he smile.
The scoreboard never shows it or
the box score in the next day’s
newspaper, but one man remembers,
two rows back, three seats over,
forever.

CP

Thomas Sheehan’s latest books are Brief Cases, Short Spans and From the Quickening. A collection of cowboy stories, Where the Cowboys Ride Forever, is now in the hands of a western publisher. His work has also appeared in many print and online publications. Sheehan has several Pushcart nominations and won the Georges Simenon Award. His web site is here.

Camp Coffee
Thomas Sheehan

When we fished the Pine River
for thirty-some years—Ed, Walter,
Brother Bentley and I—coffee was the glue;
the morning glue, the late evening glue,
even though we’d often unearth our beer
from a natural cooler in early evening,
a foot down in damp earth.

Coffee, camp coffee for your information,
has a ritual. It is thick, it is dark,
it is pot-boiled over a squaw-pine fire,
it is strong, it is enough to wake
the demon in you, to stoke the cheese
and late-night pepperoni. First man up
makes the fire, second man the coffee;

but into that pot has to go fresh
eggshells to hold the grounds down, give
coffee a taste of history, a sense of place.
That means at least one egg to be cracked
open for its shells, usually in the shadows
and glimmers of false dawn. I suspect
that's where scrambled eggs originated,

from some camp like ours, settlers rushing westerly,
lumberjacks hungry, hoboes lobbying for breakfast.
So, coffee has made its way into poems,
gatherings, memories, a time and thing not
letting go, like old stories where
the temporal voices have gone downhill and
out of range, yet hang on for the asking.

CP

Thomas Sheehan’s latest books are Brief Cases, Short Spans and From the Quickening. A collection of cowboy stories, Where the Cowboys Ride Forever, is now in the hands of a western publisher. His work has also appeared in many print and online publications. Sheehan has several Pushcart nominations and won the Georges Simenon Award. His web site is here.

Last Flags on the River
Thomas Sheehan

Dangers are everywhere about the river:
the porous bog whose underworld
has softened for centuries, the jungles
cat-o-nine tails leap up into.

Once, six new houses ago,
one new street along the banking,
two boys went to sea on a block of ice.
They are sailing yet, their last flag
a jacket shook out in dusk still hiding
in Decembers every year.

An old man has strawberries in his backyard.
They run rampant part of the year.
He planted them the year his sons caught
the last lobster the last day of their last storm,
and remembers summers and strawberries and
salt mix on the high air in the middle of December.

A truck driver, dumping snow another December,
backed out too far and went too deep. His son
stutters when the snow falls. His wife
hung a wreath at the town garage.

At the all-night diner a waitress remembers
how many times she put dark liquid in his coffee.
When she hears a thunderous Mack or a Reo or a huge
cumbersome White big as those old Walters Sno-Kings
used to be, she tastes the hard sense of late whiskeys.
He had an honest hunger and an honest thirst,
and thick eyebrows, she remembers, thick, thick eyebrows.

CP

Thomas Sheehan’s latest books are Brief Cases, Short Spans and From the Quickening. A collection of cowboy stories, Where the Cowboys Ride Forever, is now in the hands of a western publisher. His work has also appeared in many print and online publications. Sheehan has several Pushcart nominations and won the Georges Simenon Award. His web site is here.