Uncle Jamesie Recording December’s Unbroken Law
Mar 9th, 2010 | By Tom Sheehan | Category: Poetry | 430 viewsTwo other bums
tripped over him on the tracks,
Boston outbound, in December,
under a Malden moon
fracturing itself
on ice, on rails becoming one,
on his last breath caught upright.
They dropped him on my mother’s bed,
cut his ragged Mackinaw off, booted laces,
found him a worn dark suit
at the A.O.H.
They’d found two pages
of Blackstone in his pocket,
the failure who studied two pages a day
for the remnant of his life;
these even marked,
pencil frozen under key words,
stones set aside to be memorialized.
But his feet, freed of boots,
blackest of my young deaths.
I watched dread ice
slowly dismount his lashes,
saw soft tears of it go back into
his eyes, star-burst loosed from icicles,
wondered what last word he had read,
remembered. Know December now,
boots, laces, harsh cry of bedsprings,
how the significant mouth of this month
starts coming down midnight tracks
with slow howls, and dark justices,
robed in the cold crawl of it,
sitting, pointing.
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About Tom Sheehan: Bio note: Tom Sheehan’s books are Epic Cures and Brief Cases, Short Spans, from Press 53; A Collection of Friends and From the Quickening, from Pocol Press. His work is currently in new anthologies from Press 53, Home of the Brave, Stories in Uniform and Milspeak: Warriors, Veterans, Family and Friends Writing the Military Experience. He has 14 Pushcart nominations, the Georges Simenon Award for fiction, a story in the Dzanc Best of the Web Anthology for 2009 and a nomination for Best of the Web 2010. His novels include Vigilantes East, Death for the Phantom Receiver and An Accountable Death. His poetry books include The Saugus Book; Ah, Devon Unbowed; and This Rare Earth & Other Flights. He served in Korea, 1951-52, with the 31st Infantry Regiment. He has many Internet and print magazine appearances, has appeared in 11 print issues of Ocean Magazine, has 134 cowboy stories on Rope and Wire Magazine, recorded works in Qarrtsiluni, work in Rosebud, Lady Jane Miscellany, Perigee and Writing Raw, etc. He helped co-edit and issue two books on his hometown of Saugus, MA, sold 3700 to date of 4500 printed ( 842 total pages in the two books) with color sections, text, timelines, nostalgia and history, all proceeds for Saugus High School graduates via the John Burns Memorial Scholarship. Tom’s web site is at http://www.milspeak.org/TomHome2.htm. |
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