Sunday Whatever – A Triple Treat of Tom’s

Today is a real delight we have three wonderful pieces by the star who is Tom Sheehan. Anyone who has read much of Tom’s work will know how much his location near the Saugus River means to him and how it feeds his writing to take us all there with him. Tom’s time serving in Korea is another strong and most often stunning content in his huge cannon of work and Interception by a Muse includes both of these and though it may not be strictly fiction it’s a darned good read. And while you are still pondering the quality of wordsmanship read on and treat yourself to two more examples of fine writing. Upon My River, Upon My Soul and Words make up the rest of this Triple Treat.

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Interception by a Muse by Tom Sheehan

I was 24, just back from my army tour in Korea, where I’d been a rifleman and voice radio operator for the officer directing the offense in the Iron Triangle and gearing up for my freshman year at Boston College: It was starting life over again. I’d finished my tour in Korea, still working on poetry, when I could, driven to words by my Irish grandfather, Johnny Igoe, who all my early life had read Yeats to me and Mulrooney and family ghosts and haunts.

I sent letters of our real world in Korea to my father’s work address, keeping them from my mother who had waited three years for her older son to return from the Pacific’s WWII. Those years weighed on me as a schoolboy, the rush for mail, the sight of thin, slight blue service envelopes, rigged words of easy life on the sun-drenched Pacific islands.

I had registered at BC before army induction, got in a day of class, a positive move to save a place for me on a future date, left for Asia and the war, all the while planning on coming back. I was lucky, did come back, went off to school, three and a half years thumbing back and forth as a brown-bagger, my hitch-hiking stories building ventures.

And all during that time away from school, I thought I’d been writing poetry in odd hours, on strange hills, in reserve area tents beside a stove, or under stars or moon on peaceful nights. Perception later hit me broadly, instantly. It was a wise professor with that power, who harbored a love for words, who made a dent in my life.

Suddenly, in a swift shift at college, a freshman English professor wanted on his desk from each student every Friday morning 20 pages of writing on anything, “but try to make it interesting,” he admonished, with expectation in his words. “On Monday I’ll read the three I think are best prepared or best written or ahead of others.” All possibilities were cast in front of us, nodding assent, understanding, images leaping for space, couplets and lines finding each other, parts of speech bouncing acute uses, emotions threatening break-outs.

Each Monday one of my papers made the morning hit list, and my efforts caught the professor’s attention. One of my weekly assignments started thusly: ” Oh, dear Christ in heaven, the professor had catapulted us through E.A. Poe to a foreign captain; jailer extraordinary, stick wielder with long yellow teeth, sneer and contempt embedded in his face, hatred in-borne for America and the mothers of prisoners and the Grand Canyon and a Saturday full of football. The captain, Ping Too, long and fanged and yellow-toothed, with a sharpened metal toe on his shoe, the right one meant for backs, shoulders, elbows, bone, the very reach and portal of the soul.”

I did not know if it were Poe or the quickened sound beyond, a noise in the night, like the swagger stick striking on another back, across bare flesh, or the thump of the horned toe. He and Fortunato, he and the captain, the captain and Fortunato. Where did it end or begin? He could hear his English professor reading the passage, his voice alive, the tower bell ringing at the end of class, October eventually smothering him with leaves, promise of evening’s chill, winter’s brink.

After that reading, still sitting comfortably on the edge of his desk, the professor summoned me to his side and said, “Please see me after class in my office.”

Away from that class, I could hear professor John Norton reading certain passages, highlights, the language glowing on his lips, coughing his cigarette cough into paragraphs, posing his hand between belt and self in some comfort range, sitting on the edge of his desk dressed in gray sport jacket, nodding at the words leaving his mouth, his voice alive, the tower bell ringing at the end of class, October threatening to smother him with leaves in flight, trees leaning to touch, the promise of winter at hand..

With such color, with atmosphere as sharp as stilettos, echoes began to follow me around campus, down stoned steps, along bustling corridors as if there was room for talk, and down stretches of the campus, constant, embellished, travel through a funnel, a megaphone.

At his office, he tossed an open book at me across his desk, Humanistic Poetry, and pointing at the open page, said, “Have you ever read that poem?” His eyes said he was at discovery.

The words stunned me. The poem stunned me. The growth of silence stunned me. His grin stunned me. My most immediate thought was, “You thought you were writing poetry, and now this says something else.”

At the moment of magic, my life and its aims did a 180-degree turn, said a new start was in order.

He had read something he liked. Had seen something he liked. I was in special company. He lit his cigarette, nodded, smiled. “You ought to give it a go,” he added, the smile broader, the exhalation spiraling away like a leaf in wind. The procedure was like a commission ceremony: I had been called and directed.

I have recited that poem of John Nims to many audiences. I cannot count them, and keep finding with it the endless pleasure, the expectation of the next poem of my own, for I felt a change had come in the road ahead. I can recall mark that day, hour, temperature, with those foundation words: “A boy I once knew, arms gold as saddle leather, lakeblue eyes, found in foreign sky extravagant death. Dreamy in school, parsed tragic Phaeton, heard of war, arose surprised, gravely shook hands and left us. His name once grey in convent writing, neat on themes, cut like erosion of fire the peaks of heaven. The Arab saw strange flotsam fall, the baseball sounding spring, the summer roadster pennoned with bright hair, the Halloween dance, the skaters’ kiss at midnight on the carillons of ice.”

 It was John Nims who said it, from the mouth of another man, in a classroom at Boston College, Nestor for us home from one war; with word about a boy not home yet from another war, whose lakeblue eyes light a photograph I know more than 60 years later as though the boy sits on my mantel eyeing me, John Norton’s voice accosting me with flight, the old classroom, May of the year’s end eventually crawling through the windows like an escapee from the past coming back to where he belonged. Oh, how I found it true that happiness often depended on sadness, partners in all of this.

John Norton’s voice repeats itself: Caught between him, the poet, and the captain, the change still at work, the echoes ringing all the while, the smile of pleasure ever in one man’s eyes.

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The second piece today is another that doesn’t fit our usual criteria but we all appreciate the expertise that is so obvious in everything that Tom sends us and can’t in all conscience reject such stuff.

Upon My River, Upon My Soul

What of all the spills that ache here — upland dosage where the delta’s done and settling its own routines, the near immeasurable transfer of land and other properties of the continent chasing down Atlantic ways, shifting nations and cities from directly underfoot, moving towns along the watershed, oozing territories.

Oh, how I loved the river feeding the ocean.

I have plumbed the Saugus River at its mouth, found the small artifacts of its leaning seaward, tiny bits of history and geography getting muddied up against the Atlantic drift, suffering at tide’s stroke, roiling and eddying to claim selves, marveling at a century’s line of movement, its casual change of character, its causal stress and slight fracturing under ocean’s dual drives, the endless pulsing tide and the overhead draft of clouds bringing their inland torment and trial, land and loam and leaf running away with the swift sprinters of water, the headlong rush of heading home like salmon bursting upstream for the one place they can remember in the chemistry of life, impulses stronger than electricity, smells calling in the water more exotic than Chinese perfume.

The flounder, sheaving under the bridge at the marsh road, pages of an un-sprung book, one-eyed it always seems, hungering for my helpless and hooked worms, sort over parts of Saugus in this great give-away, and nose into the extraneous parts that were my town, my town.

“Listen,” my father said to me, his eyes dark, oh black during a whole generation, “for a sound whose syllable you can’t count up or down, for what you might think is a clam being shucked, a quahog’s last quiet piss on sand, a kelp bubble exploding its one green-stressed overture.”

He talked like that when he knew I was listening, even at ten years of age.

He wasn’t saying, “Listen for me,” just, “Listen for the voices, the statements along Atlantic ritual, every driven shore, rocks sea-swabbed, iodine fists of air potent as a heavyweight’s, tides tossing off their turnpike hum, black-edged brackish ponds holding on for dear life, holding a new sun sultry as anchovies … all of them have words for you.”

 I hear that oath of his, the Earth-connected vow all the sea bears, the echoes booming like whale sounds, their deep musical communication, now saying one of his memorials, “Sixty-years and more, I feel you touch Normandy’s sand, measuring the grains of your hope, each grain a stone; and I know the visions last carved in June’s damp air.” 

“Oh,” he’d add, “you sons, forgotten masters of our fate.”

Deepest of all, hearing what I didn’t hear at ten, but hear ever since, the hull-hammered rattling before rescue from the USS Squalus, 60 fathoms down off Portsmouth, the sound and the petition count never fading; three quarters of a century of desperation and plea hammering in my ears.

Say it straight out: “Some were saved and some were lost. That is a memorial.”

The eels squirm and fidget on Saugus farmlands, pitch-black bottom land gone south with rain and years, gutter leanings, great steel street drains emptying lawns and backyards and sidewalk driftage into the river below black clouds. The worn asphalt shingles on my roof yield twenty-five years of granules, and now and then tell that story inside the house.

A ninety-year-old pear tree shudders under lightning and offers pieces of itself as sacrifice to the cause, dropping twigs, blasted bark other lightning has tossed into the soft footing, the grayed-out hair of old nests, my initials and hers and the scored heart time has scabbed up, dated, pruned, becoming illegible in the high fancy of new leaves and young shoots. There, too, went my father’s footprints in one April storm, washed away in late afternoon as he lay sleeping in that tree’s hammock; and grease off my brother’s hands from his Ford with nine lives hanging on a chain-fall; and across the street a neighbor’s ashes spread under grapevines and pear tree an August fire later took captive in dark smoke I still smell on heavy summer evenings.

Follows is my word on all of this:

 It is where the river’s done, where a boy’s hung between the sunlit surface and a pinch of salt, who’s read of twisted souls at sea, knew sweet misery of warming sand, I know how water marks horizon’s dwelling where dark stream and ocean meet twice in the flow of bayside surge and ocean merge grasps the river’s downhill push, losing lush things like the very gravel I have trod, and the locks and board holding back my river horde.

Oh, believe … I have come up by image from the sea in other times, by overhand, by curragh, by slung-sailed ship of oak, afloat a near-sunken log; have crawled sandy edges of the bay, looked back at waters’ merge and flow, found the river’s crawl reversed where floating parts are nursed, toting redwing nests the winds abuse, good ground the rain in swift return hauls down the river … Saugus on the loose.

Ever now, when I fish at the mouth of the river, rod high, and hope too, I catch awful parts of Saugus. I know the stream and ocean meet where I dare dangle my awkward feet, where love-lies-bleeding and the primrose meet, where tempting sea and bay greet all of rhyme and so its clime:

The rainbow catches up the horde; Sea color is set by gracious Lord. This, in faith, you can believe; It’s Saugus I cannot lose or leave. I race the river to the sea always it’s ahead of me.

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Words

Memories, much of recollection, hang on me desperate for sound, for eyes not mine, for those strangers who succumb to a few words, an image, my say in all of this, words free but costly, how connections arise, surprise, stay afloat, stay aboard. In high school, a girl turned away from my hello and walked elegantly off to her lifetime, smiling yet, a raving beauty yet, mother-proud, regal in skirts, perfect edge of temperament.  The same day, before anybody else, I slyly tore open my brother’s fragile V-mail letter from war’s wild Pacific, its onionskin contents marked by a censor’s serious look at life. And I also heard my cousin’s telephone voice for the last time, from a Port of Embarkation somewhere on the East Coast, and remember his falsetto voice holding back, saying nothing, saying everything important to us.

They must have ears like mine, turn to cool jazz after hearing Puccini at his best. In New Jersey, Jimmy Smith heard trumpets, knew what Auden meant, saying, “In the nightmare of the dark /All the dogs of Europe bark,” and words that fell from my poetic grandfather’s lips like reading from an Old-World cairn, “Red Fergus put down on a warring O’Sheehaughn,” words of music I heard and recognized as my own, and war changing everything we knew, heathens tossing stones at the other village.

Yet my heart’s locked into Saugus whose streets I walk the way I’ll walk another paradise, if there’s one like this, if I can earn my way to it, where the river comes palpable touching East Saugus, where one sees old pilings and boats, worn by muscle and time, continuing journeys back into earth, where marshes turn suddenly brown, then white, and where friends, old , lost and forlorn, herald every corner I turn, telling me they love what I still have.                                   

 At Aveiro, Portugal, by the river’s mouth, boats scatter as compass points, small scoops on an interminable huge sea rising to the line of sight where  gallant Genovese fell off the known world. They wait oarsmen, hands warm with women, mouths rich with memory and signals, whose sons later come to these small boats topping the Atlantic, anchored by thin rope and night’s tidal pull. It’s where I stood between commotion and silence, spills of olla podridas riding the air with ripeness, early bath scents, night’s wet mountings, saw boats move like sea and earth move against a distant cloud. I questioned the hammer that drove the raw poles of moorings into the sea floor; a mustachioed Latin god, laughing at his work while waving to a woman on the strand, sees her, urged from bed or kitchen, eye him eye to eye. An artist could tell us what’s missing is important; before dawn, an oarsman knows old calluses where Atlantic sends messages up through heel and calf, through thigh’s thew and spinal matter radiant in miles of nerves, while small boats gathered at Aveiro speak of loneliness.

In high school, a girl turned away from my hello and walked elegantly off to her lifetime, smiling yet, a raving beauty still, mother-proud, regal in skirts, perfect edge of temperament.  The same day, before anybody else, I slyly tore open my brother’s fragile V-mail letter from war’s wild Pacific, its onionskin contents marked by a censor’s serious look at life. And I also heard my cousin’s telephone voice for the last time, from a Port of Embarkation somewhere on the East Coast, remembering his falsetto voice holding back, saying nothing, saying everything important to us.

Tom Sheehan

Image: Pixabay.com – Potpourri of coloured leaves.