From Vinegar Hill, A Small Red Star for Me and My Father
                    Tom Sheehan

This appointment came when light tired, this arrangement, this syzygy
      of him and me and the still threat of a small red star standing
            some time away at my back, deeper than a grain of memory.
I am a quarter mile from him, hard upward on this rugged rock he could
      look up to if only his eyes would agree once more, and it’s a trillion
            years behind my head or a parsec I can’t begin to imagine,
they tell me even dead perhaps, that star. Can this be a true syzygy
      if one is dead, if one is leaning to leave this line of sight
            regardless of age or love or density or how the last piece of light
might be reflected, or refused, if one leaves this imposition? The windows
      of his room defer no light to this night, for it is always night there,
            blood and chemicals at warfare, nerve gone, the main one
providing mirror and lethal lens, back of the eyeball no different
      than out front, but I climb this rock to line up with another rock and him
            in the deep seizure of that stolen room, bare sepulcher,
that grotto of mind.

Today I bathed him, the chest like an old model, boned but collapsible,
      forgotten in a Detroit back room, a shelf, a deep closet, waiting
            to be crushed at the final blow, skin of the organ but a veneer
of fatigue, the arms pried as from a child’s drawing, the one less formidable
      leg, the small testes hanging their forgotten-glove residuum,
            which had begun this syzygy, the face closing down on bone
as if a promise had been made toward an immaculately thin retrieval,
      and, at the other imaginable end of him, the one foot bloody
            from his curse, soured yet holier in mimicry of the near-Christ
(from Golgotha brought down and put to bed, after god and my father
      there are no divinities), toenails coming on a darkness no sky owned,
            foot bottom at its own blood bath, at war, at the final and resolute war
with no winner.

Oh, Christ, he’s had such wars, outer and inner, that even my hand
      in warmth must overcome, and he gums his gums and shakes his head
            and says, sideways, mouth screwed into his outlandish grin,
as much a lie as any look, as devious, cold-fact true, “I used to do this for you,”
      the dark eyes hungry to remember, to bring back one moment
            of all those times to this time; and I cannot feel his hand linger on me,
not its calluses gone the way of flesh or its nails thicker now than they
      ever were meant to be, or skin flaking in the silence of its dust-borne battle,
            though we are both younger than the star that’s behind us
and dead perhaps, as said; then, in a moment, and only for a moment,
      as if all is ciphered for me and cut away, I know the failure
            of that small red star, its distillation and spend still undone,
its yawn red as yet and here with us on the endless line only bent
      by my imagination, the dead and dying taking up both ends of me,
            neither one a shadow yet but all shadows in one, perhaps
a sort of harmless violence sighting here across an endless known.     

_________________________________________________________________
Father

His face
is made of music,
notes of an order
I have yet to know.

The mystics
of his hands,
engraved with the timeless,
bear strange anointments.

The salt
of his touch, once known,
leaps up past
all of pain.

After God
and my father
there are no divinities.

_________________________________________
Father’s Drinking Pail

In solace hours, twilight’s heaviness,
an arm’s hammer permanently halts
at its post above a half undriven nail.
Not that he was a man without faults,

is the argument I keep with myself,
knowing there are other nails left
in their half places, unheeded, slowly
standing out in late evening’s drift.

Such liquid rust they loose, shear stains
on bleached-out wood, avid as Mary’s tears,
become images, memory’s assignations;
father belting one back, Rorschach fears

that time spent on work goes unrewarded.
“It’s such small pay,” he’d say, “this pail,”
hanging his hammer up, and wired tin can
he drank from, there on half another nail.

_______________________________________

Night Forgery

Just before dawn

a shadow makes tracks

in the dew‑lit grass.



Later, a whisper

and a scent follow

the forsaken imprints


Not a leaf stirs,

but if I watch closely,

blades of grass ease upright,


a loam granule

is released to airs

staggering under stars,


and the whisper, vague,

is familiar, perhaps stripped

from gists of old conversations.


Years ago

at a Red Sox game I

became separated from my father.


All the goblins

of young creation hung over

my hysteria, poked at my terror.


When he found me,

pawed, frayed, diminished,

he said he'd never leave me again.


This soft forging

in the night grass

is a kept word, a vow.


______________________________________________

Once Screamed to the Flag-waving Drunks at the Vets Bar,
Late, Memorial Day Evening

Fifty years now and they come at me, in Chicago,
Crown Point, Indiana, by phone from Las Vegas.
I tell them how it happened, long after parting, one
night when I was in a bar, thinking of them all.
**
Listen, gunmen,
all I can smell is the gunpowder
on you sharper than booze.
You wear your clothes
with a touch of muzzle flash.

Is it a story you want…?
Listen to the years ago,
to the no shooting,
to the no rout,
to the just dying.

The day stank,
it wore scabs, had odors
to choke tissues and burn
secret laminations of the lungs.
Rain festered in soot clouds,
rose in the Pacific
or the Sea of Japan,
dumped down on us,
came up out of yellow clay
like a sore letting out.

The air must have been
full of bats, of spider weavings;
it was lonely as the lobo,
yet a jungle of minds
filled it with thought leaves
shining with black onyx.

Who needs doctors at dying…?
Prayers sew wounds, piece heads,
hearts, hands together, when blood
and clay strike the same irrevocable
vein, arterial mush; when God
is the earth and clay, silence,
the animal taker leaning to grasp.

Listen, gunmen,
listen you heroes in mirrors
only you see into, we through,
it isn’t the killing, it’s the dying
must be felt, associated,
even if it stinks.

Blood freezes in hot days
of dying, is icicle inside movement
of trickery less than glacier’s,
where a man crawls to his maker
up his own veins, is touched,
feels the firebrand burn in the cold.

Where are the shade trees, cool drinks…?
Once I froze in the confessional
against the fire.

He was a Spick,
they said, washed his skin
too much, wanted to sandpaper it white,
be us, be another man.

But we wagered ourselves
to get him out of a minefield
live as breathing, comrade shot
down in the clay in the rain
in the time of bright eyes rolling
with thunder’s fear.

Was it him we carried, or the stone
of his monument…?
Tons he was of responsibility,
one of us despite the Spick name,
man being borne to die.

God is everywhere,
the catechism says, my son says,
now, years later. It was once
a divinity we carried on the poles,
with his balls gone pistonless,
no more a god to his woman.
His image rolled red on the canvas,
burned through the handles of the litter
as secret as electricity; Spick shooting
himself into us, Godhead shooting signs
up shafts of wood.

Lugging God
on sticks and canvas
is frightening. We felt this.
Jesus! We screamed,
have You let go of this god…?
Do You fill him up making him burn
our hands? He wanders now for times,
rolling himself together,
womanless, childless, a journey
in dark trees, among leaves,
in jungles, to get near You.

God seeking God
at the intercept of shrapnel,
the tearing down and lifting up
by our hands, God
in the cement of death.

Oh, gunmen,
it’s the dying not the killing
you must speak of. This day
is theirs, not ours, belongs
to the gods of the dead,
of the Spick we carried to his dying
and all his brothers, none of them
here among us.

Drink, gunmen,
one to the Spick and grave’s companions,
jungle flights they are in
to match their god with God.

And think, gunmen,
who among us have the longest journey
among leaves, in darkness,
through the spiders of trees,
now.

____________________________________________________

SUGARING

My father hid his diabetes
in black shoe tops. At night
he peeled off bloody socks
where veins found short circuiting.

My mother bought white cotton
socks by the dozens, band aid
throwaways after work or Sunday
best, after his heart pumped

its way down long lean legs
deep Nicaraguan paths had known
every baseball diamond Boston
shook under red August skies,

who-knows-what in Shanghai.
Later on it went topsy-turvy
in eyeballs' secret caves,
refracting light into bones,

porous humors going to sponge,
into space where ideas lose out.
When he sat to peel his socks
from their red-wounding rounds,

checking the salvage of the day
like a crow beside the macadam,
or thumbed a brailled king of
hearts or a diamond five

before he pegged me off the board,
I used to congratulate myself
for not saying anything to him.
He'd shuck off such words just

as he would an uncomfortable
compliment: they paid nothing,
they did nothing, they sat on the
ear like old, old promises.

Just piles of junk, he'd say,
the letter of vocabularies
and sore intentions. Even now
at cribbage or haberdashery,

seeing apod men humbled to knee,
clothesline flush with socks
as if a semaphore is working,
I remember how he crossed one

leg over the other, fingered
a sock, slowly peeled the skin
away from his angry feet,
casting off evening's surrender flag,

like an Indian,
godless,
from his coals.

_________________________________________

Two Ways of Sitting on A Porch


 I.

Father, in summer’s rocker he’d
won in a poker game a friend
lost with two Jacks
covered, at hand
wand of a ladle

turning a crock
of homemade brew
coming on empty;
   in the street two
crows lost in traffic.

                   II.

On another oak rocker my
sister found yellowed
in a Maine barn, his
leg from just below
the knee still
in a bag some-

place, both eyes
in similar flight;
him, hearing cat purr
of a half-filled crock
of brew, listening for stars.

__________________________________________________