Tom Sheehan has 24 Pushcart Prize nominations. 375 western stories on Rope and Wire Magazine. His published books include: In the Garden of Long Shadows, From The Quickening, A Collection Of Friends, and The Nations, about Native Americans, all available from Pocol Press.
The Westering (appeared in Word Catalyst, 2009)
Born
to Wear the Rags of War (appeared in collection, This Rare Earth &
Other Flights, 2003)
A
Last Moment Caught (appeared in Ken* Again, 2009)
The
Westering
It is brittle now, the remembering, how we drove you
East
with
your backpack like a totem in the rear seat, so that
you could walk westerly across the continent’s
spine,
across the sum of all the provinces, through places
you had been before, and we had been, and the Cree
and the Owlcreek bear and wolves envisioned
when night screams upwind the way stars loose
their valid phantoms.
Now it seems the ready truth
that juxtaposition is just a matter of indifference,
because we have all been where we are going,
into selves, shadows, odd shining, all those places
the mind occupies, or the heart, or a lung at
exercise.
You had already passed places you would come into
when we knew your hailing us down, thumb a pennant,
face a roadside flag,
halting our pell-mell island rush.
To go westerly, to walk across the world’s
arching top,
you said you had to go east, to know Atlantic salt,
kelp
girding rocks at anchor, clams sucking the earth down,
to be at ritual with Europe’s ocean itself, that
mindless
sea of barks and brigantines and lonely buoy bells
arguing their whereabouts in the miseries of fog,
sing-
ular as canyon coyote.
We promised you holy water
at Cape Tormentine, reaching place of The Maritimes,
a fist thrust ready for Two-Boat Irish Islanders,
tenting,
the soft sands at Cavendish, a holy trough of journey,
a wetting place, publican’s house of the first
order,
drinks hale and dark and well met and Atlantic ripe
as if everything the bog’s
known the drink has.
It’s more apparent now, after you moved
outbound,
or inward on the continent, trailing yourself, dreams,
through wild Nations once ringing one another,
your journey was endless. Nine years now at it,
horizons loose on eternity, trails blind-ending
in a destiny of canyons too deep to be heard,
and your mail comes
like
scattered echoes, horse
shoes clanging against stakes in twilight campgrounds,
not often enough or soon enough or long enough,
only soft where your hand touches hide, hair, heart
caught out on the trail, wire-snipped, hungry, heavy
on the skewers you rack out of young spruce.
Out of jail, divinity
school, bayonet battalion, ice-
house but only in winters, asking Atlantic
blessing for your march into darkness, light,
we freed you into flight. You have passed yourself
as we have heading out to go back, up to go down,
away from home just to get home. Are you this way
even now, windward,
wayward, free as the falcon
on the mystery of a thermal, passing through yourself?
You go where the elk has been, noble Blackfoot
of the Canadas, beaver endless in its palatial
gnawing,
all that has gone before your great assault,
coincident,
harmonic, knowing that matter does not lose out,
cannot be destroyed,
but lingers for your touching
in one form or another, at cave mouth, closet canyon,
perhaps now only falling as sound beneath stars
you count as friends and confidants. Why is your mail
ferocious years apart in arrival? You manage hotels,
prepare salads, set great roasts for their timing,
publish a book on mushrooms
just to fill your pack anew
and walk on again, alone, over Canada’s high
backbone,
to the islands’ ocean, the blue font you might
never
be blessed in. Nine years at it! Like Troy counting
downward to itself: immense, imponderable, but there.
A year now since your last card, Plains-high, August,
a new book started,
but no topic said, one hand
cast in spruce you cut with the other, your dog
swallowed by a mountain, one night of loving
as a missionary under the Pole Star and canvas
by a forgotten road coming from nowhere.
We wonder, my friend, if you are still walking,
if you breathe,
if you touch the Pacific will Atlantic
ritual be remembered as we remember it: high-
salted air, rich as sin, wind-driven like the final
broom,
gulls at havoc, at sea a ship threatening
disappearance,
above it all a buoy bell begging to be heard,
and our eyes
on the back of your head.
Born to
Wear the Rags of War
The
day had gone over hill, but that still, blue light remained,
cut
with a gray edge, catching corners rice paddies lean out of.
In
the serious blue brilliance of battle they’d become comrades
becoming
friends, just Walko and Williamson and Sheehan
sitting
in the night drinking beer cooled by Imjin River waters
in
August of ‘51 in Korea.
Three
men drably clad,
Stars
hung pensive neon. Mountain-cool silences were being earned,
hungers
absolved, a ponderous god talked to. Above silences,
the
ponderous god’s weighty as clouds, elusive as soot on wind,
yields
promises. They used church keys to tap cans, lapped up
silence
rich as missing salt, fused their backbones to good earth
in
a ritual old as labor itself,
Such
an August night gives itself away, tells tales, slays the rose
in
reeling carnage, murders sleep, sucks moisture out of Mother Earth,
fires
hardpan, sometimes does not die itself just before dawn,
makes
strangers in one’s selves,
those
who wear the rags of war.
They
had been strangers beside each other, caught in the crush
of
tracered night and starred flanks, accidents of men drinking beer
cooled
in the bloody waters where brothers roam forever, warriors come
to
that place by fantastic voyages, carried by generations
of
the persecuted or the adventurous, carried in sperm body, dropped
in
the spawning, fruiting womb of America,
Walko,
reincarnate of the Central European, come of land lovers
and
those who scatter grain seed, bones like logs, wrists strong
as
axle trees, fair and blue-eyed, prankster, ventriloquist who talked
off
mountainside, rumormonger for fun, heart of the hunter,
hide
of the herd, apt killer,
Williamson,
faceless in the night, black set on black,
only
teeth like high piano keys, eyes that captured stars,
fine
nose got from Rome through rape or slave bed unknown
generations
back, was cornerback tough, graceful as ballet dancer
(Walko’s
opposite), hands that touched his rifle the way a woman’s
touched,
or a doll, or one’s fitful child caught in fever clutch,
came
sperm-tossed across the cold Atlantic, some elder Virginia-
bound
bound in chains, the Congo Kid come home,
the
Congo Kid, alas, alas,
Sheehan,
reluctant at trigger-pull, dreamer, told deep lies
with
dramatic ease, entertainer who wore shining inward a sum
of
ghosts forever from the cairns had fled; heard myths
and
the promises in earth and words of songs he knew he never knew,
carried
scars vaguely known as his own, shared his self with saint
and
sinner, proved pregnable to body force,
------Walko:
We
lost the farm. Someone stole it. My father
loved
the fields, sweating. He watched grass grow by starlight,
the
moon slice at new leaves. The mill’s where he went for work,
in
the crucible, drawing on the green vapor, right in the heat of it,
the
miserable heat. My mother said he started dying the first day.
It
wasn’t the heat or green vapor did it, just going off to the mill,
grassless,
tight in. The system took him. He wanted to help.
It
took him, killed him a little each day, just smothered him.
I
kill easy. Memory does it. I was born for this, to wear
these
rags. The system gives, then takes away. I’ll never
go
piecemeal like my father.
------Williamson:
Know why I’m here? I’m from North Ca’lina,
sixteen
and big and wear size fifteen shoes and my town
drafted
me ‘stead of a white boy. Chaplain says he git me home.
Shit!
Be dead before then. Used to hunt home, had to eat
what
was fun runnin’ down. Brother shot my sister
and
a white boy in the woods. Caught them skinnin’ it up
against
a tree, run home and kissed Momma goodbye,
give
me his gun. Ten years, no word. Momma cries about
both
them all night. Can’t remember my brother’s face.
Even
my sister’s. Can feel his gun, though, right here
in
my hands, long and smooth and all honey touch. Squirrel’s
left
eye never too far away for that good old gun.
Them
white men back home know how good I am, and send me here,
put
these rags on me. Two wrongs! Send me too young
and
don’t send my gun with me. I’m goin’ to fix it all up,
gettin’
home too. They don’t think I’m coming back,
them
white men. They be nervous when I get back, me and that
good
old gun my brother give me,
------Sheehan:
Stories are my food. I live and lust on them.
Spirits
abound in the family, indelible eidolons; the O’Siodhachain
and
the O’Sheehaughn carved a myth. I wear their scars in my soul,
know
the music that ran over them in lifetimes, songs’ words,
and
strangers that are not strangers: Muse Devon abides with me,
moves
in the blood and bag of my heart, whispers tonight:
Corimin
is in my root cell, oh bright beauty of all
that
has come upon me, chariot of cheer, carriage of Cork
where
the graves are, where my visit found the root
of
the root cell---Johnny Igoe at ten running ahead
of
the famine that took brothers and sisters, lay father down;
sick
in the hold of ghostly ship I have seen from high rock
on
Cork’s coast, in the hold heard the myths and musics
he
would spell all his life, remembering hunger and being alone
and
brothers and sisters and father gone and mother
praying
for him as he knelt beside her bed that hard morning
when
Ireland went away to the stern. I know that terror
of
hers last touching his face. Pendalcon’s grace
comes
on us all at the end. Johnny Igoe came alone at ten
and
made his way across Columbia, got my mother who got me
and
told me when I was twelve that one day Columbia
would
need my hand and I must give. And tonight I say,
“Columbia,
I am here with my hands
and
with my rags of war.”
I
came home alone. And they are my brothers.
Walko is my brother. Williamson is my brother.
Muse Devon is my brother. Corimin is my brother.
Pendalcon is my brother.
God is my brother.
I
am a brother to all who are dead,
we
all wear the rags of war.
A Last Moment
Caught
It comes again,
without prejudice,
in another millennium:
I know the weight
of an M-1 rifle
on a web strap hanging on my
shoulder,
the awed knowledge of a ponderous
steel helmet
atop my head, press of a tight
lace on one
boot, wrap of a leather watch band
on my wrist,
and who stood beside me
who stand no more.~Tom Sheehan
