Originally appeared in Four Volts, UK.
Jesus, Thomas, take my hand again! Walk the field with me. We belong together, you and I. Dispel me of doom. Let the music of words come, let them dance in your eye, roll on your tongue, live to die on the page. Let them vibrate on your spine, get kissed of your skin, shoot out of here in flight of geese, and mournful sound of heading home when there is no home, steaming freight train whistle calling you from a circle of blue nights, self shout at the moon shining on a hill east of Cleveland, South of Yang-du, east a long stretch from the Chugach given in a word picture, west of cliffs near Kerry, rain moving as a god laughing at rootstock of silence, Celtic mummery, God buried in stone.
If you can't come with me, Thomas, you're the loser, lonely, forsaken. I can take you back to the hard places, to adjectives and verb ends; to the quadrangle in Japan in 1951 and the cool wind coming through Camp Drake and the voice of death talking in it and calling Maciag's name (Body Hunger) and Salazar (Arab Dagger) and Captain Kay (Memphis Peon) and Billy Pigg (Cowpoke) and Stony Mason (Pennsy Slateman) and Anadazio (Bread You Can't Imagine) and Dan Bertelsen (AKA The Knife) and you listened and it didn't talk your name and you felt sad and knew you were the only ear. In three weeks they were all gone, and their voices went into ground, and all their words, and they built on the word rock and now they still dance sadly… such words that make you cry with music still in them, and they come slowly out of another time funnel, like Billy Pigg saying, "Shit," as he rolled over in your arms and Captain Kay saying, "I just want to go home for a little while and tell Merle and Andy I love them. Just for an hour or so."
Do you remember, later, far from the Land of the Morning Calm, the room in Ireland, that space of pewter walls, made hard by the anvil? The spark spray of peacock's fire, head-tucked-under-wing smell ripe as working acids, dead melons; tin-plated, throat-sucking water weaving its skin of iron dust thick as magnetized talcum; the unknown and unsure shapes of heat, cool in its third form, introducing friction to matter, the sound a gulping sizzle swallowing bar, freezing form, and the voice of the man at the end of the hammer and the end of your poem, saying, "That poem, my man, is iron. You made a good pour, a good draw. You beat it well. It's iron." And all the words come out of ground, out of rock, erupt and blow at you.
I am Saugus. I can make you cry. I remember more than you the sound of silence just before the word breaks. I am the edge of all things, the point of it all, Saugus.
When Tom Sheehan was young, his grandfather recited poems to
him. "Listen," he'd say, "hear the words. Know them. Hear the
music. Obey it."
In time he found friends, fields, memorable teachers. One,
now 92, is co-editor of two hometown books. He served in
Korea, went to Boston College, married nurse Beth Rooney,
the most compassionate woman ever known, and had six
children. He's painted his house five times, replaced two
roofs, and raises great crops of flowers fronting the house
built in 1742.
Soon he meets again for a three hour lunch and gab session
with his pals.