He has come out of a dread silence and given himself a name; Saugus, he says. He
bleats like a tethered goat to come out of that coming, to be away, dense spiral to
the core of self, to the mountain call, bird arc across such slopes of pale imaginings.
Saugus, he says: I am that part of you cries not for the love but intimacy of words,
light touch of skin we dread and seek, owning up of self as if in another. I am that
part of you named endless searcher, thirsty one, guzzler, sufferer, warred on, the
starved and the wasted, that part of you you can’t turn over by yourself. I have the
secrets you do not know you know. I am lodged in a far corner of mind, some
fallow place at reins’ end, waiting to be routed out, turned up, to green a page again.
Has it taken you so long to find me, or do you ignore me and try it on your own?
You cannot avoid documented lightning, shock of metaphor, God on one knee,
Saugus. I am not a stranger. I breathe with you, find shelter and warmth when you
do, know the single star haunting the edge of your horizon, know best of all the
magic when the sound is right, Oh, Thomas! when the sound is the music of one
word upon another, and it tears two parts of soul to four because nothing like it has
been heard before, when the word dances on its consonants, slides on soft vowels,
when the spine knows the word is known by every ganglia, thong and sinew of the
body. The coring.
previously published in This Rare Earth & Other Flights by Lit Pot Press.
Tom Sheehan, tot tired yet, still working this machine in his 87th year, just avoiding a defibrillator-pacemaker procedure next week because of discovered improvements in health, this author, Tom Sheehan, served in the 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea, 1951. His books (print/eBooks) are Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans; A Collection of Friends; From the Quickening; and This Rare Earth & Other Flights (poetry). He has 24 Pushcart nominations and 360 stories on Rope and Wire Magazine. Recent eBooks from Milspeak Publishers include Korean Echoes, 2011, nominated for a Distinguished Military Award and The Westering, 2012, nominated for a National Book Award. His newest eBooks, from Danse Macabre, are Murder at the Forum, an NHL mystery novel, Death of a Lottery Foe, Death by Punishment and An Accountable Death. In the publication cycle is In the Garden of Long Shadows, a collection of short stories from Pocol Press. His work is in/coming in Provo Canyon Review (2nd issue), Rosebud (6th issue), The Linnet’s Wings (6th issue), Ocean Magazine (8th issue), and internet sites and print magazines/anthologies in Romania, France, Ireland, England, Scotland, Italy, Thailand, China, Mexico, Canada, etc. He lives in Saugus, MA
