Sunday Whatever – Movie on a Sunday Afternoon by Tom Sheehan

Anyone who has been around the site for any time at all will be more than aware of the genius that is Tom Sheehan. His work is always beautifully written and even when we have rejected stories it has mostly been because there is so much of his work and he could truly have a site dedicated to him alone. Sometimes a piece of his writing comes along and it is just so lovely to read that we need to share it. This is such a piece, we think.

Movie on A Sunday Afternoon

A stone pretends to understand the cold.

A hedge rattles beside the road.

Elm trees cry all along their shanks as if the bones are loose underneath and will compound the breaking.

From my haversack a dream breaks out September-apple plump.

It is not September turning inside out all around me. It is August heat left over in the back end of night and the cold October sends early and the water true as omen rising in the Atlantic, ogres at odds.

The barn shakes all the way back into its other existence, boards and beams and joists and lintels shudder half way into the new life taking them underground again, back to the old stretch, the nesting, the leaf shaken free, sap frozen under an inch of bark, sizzle in April where the sun is a hot spot and ignition traverses the dowsing roots and the limb of the highest arc.

Toads move into slowed-down earth, miners, membrane diggers, sand hogs, eaters of deep loam, mud suckers, rambling root rooters having left all their warts for my children’s hands.

Now, under the moon’s paintbrush, grass shivers and crackles and snaps under the awesome light, the ponderous gleam of cold moonlight as sharp as edges from arrowhead flakes.

Where my footsteps fall across the tender field, heading to where The Bear lights the way, grass answers and so the moon.

I have tracked myself to a childhood altar shaped into a cliff face by old millennium mobsters shooting up everything about the old place. The gods here wore darkness well, milled about in hard cloisters, sang windy Gregorian dirges and airs full of earth        movement and fossils and the reach of fire still seen in pied rock face.  All my fears are rooted in this place: height, well depths, falling free, other omnipotence, being alone, impotence, graveyards with moving shadows, engine failure, lapsed insurance, stock market ignorance, pillow on my face, electricity, love.

It is the season for hurricanes, the old book says. You can read a page at a time on the subway or a surface bus or on a slick, oiled, aerodynamically-designed singular of the caboose. Wind means the Earth is turning faster, spinning on its old seventeen-degree axis with hardly any worries of the universe holding it back.

September/October.

Once I punted a football ninety yards with the roll and Herky Harris (nee Hercules Haristopolous) ran it back eighty yards before Les Woodbury caught him from behind, too tired to move on. That prevented another hurricane from starting out in the bed of my night and the recall of every singular distinctive action that has levered me. That night I dreamed a girl riding on a bicycle with a boy named Claude who had curls and Hollywood smiles at the quick draw. I saw him paw her on the bike.

(Oh, Love.)

Saugus 7, Peabody 0. Me 1, Dreams 0. Some part of her flesh found my mouth. Moonlight tastes salty, marshy, best of bracken, temptation. The sea is just over the hill from her couch. Oh, God, the gods attend her touch. Wherever is white against a pillow, a breast, a howling outside a thin wall as if the Atlantic has come home to roost, roofs at sudden flight, shingles at shrapnel and the night full of odd artillery pieces, old .76-ers the Germans had, one-five-fives, eight-inch hunks of Herod at his best. Then the breast draws you back from other violences besides your heart, leaves you waywarding. Who remembers a wind with a name and a silhouette and a summoning with roses. Who remembers your hand and mouth remembering a breast and a storm and a cry beside the hill. What’s hidden, is.

(I knew sweet suffocation the first night you sat on my mouth. You were new, vague, restless, utterly transparent. Oh, glory, what a turncoat you proved to be.)

September shakes like hoboes rising from dreams on old benches and the wrap of yesterday’s newspapers, a stolen overcoat, a pizza box for a pillow because of the remnant smells, even of deadly anchovies. September moves on different legs. Runs a race three-legged and at odds with all timekeepers. Spits out of the Island ways and Cape ways and migratory paths we all think are reserved for the high flights of cranes and Canada geese blunt as old cigars or smashed cars in New Hampshire fields once bent under the plow and now the press of cold steel, aluminum and chrome failing in the sun and hundreds of rides to heavens and harshly back to such grass of place.

(What I meant to say was, I remember that night and you do not, and I am alone, moving on a Sunday afternoon, Celluloid Sam at it again.)

Tom Sheehan

Image – a pot pourri from pixabay.com