Tom Sheehan
Rubble, Barn Style

Dust from last century
settles deeper, tattles
tales when jammed open
by a heavy broom, a toe

dragged through lifelines,
the demise of contours.
Barns this size, kneed
in the groin by January

storms, wet coughs of April,
August retreats from fire
when gummed capillaries
draw back to old dowsing

grounds, always show age,
the way blue ribbons are worn.
sun, even a dish-bright moon,
occasionally a star if you’re

still in your tracks, breathless,
hoist themselves where nails
also fell to mines of earth.
But it is here that iron

and wood trade final secrets.
Under rust’s thickest scab
the metal keeps its black shine;
abrade it with rock and stone

and the line of light leaps out,
like the flesh of wood flashes
its white mysteries orbiting
marks of lunar growth.

A mole tortures underground,
a host of bats above like gloves
hang to dry in the dim light,
and in twisted byroads

and blossoming paths the termites,
carpenter ants and dust beetles
chew the cud of oak sills, risers
an ash released to two-hand saw,

and green pine checked, stippled,
full of eyes where knots let go.
square nails, blunt as cigars,
suddenly toothless, a century

of shivering taking its toll,
shake free as slow as worms.
For all the standing still
there’s action, warming, aging,

the bowing of an old barn,
ultimate genuflection.

RFrom Nahant, Atlantic Rub, Pacific Skip

                        For hours he'd been
diving for god knows what, a ballistic bursting air
each time he came up fanning for life, amateur at
what I was good at, surviving, reaching under all
of Neptune it seems.

                        He brought up a stone, gray,
smooth as the millennium, travel yet indelible, still
worth rubbing, he said when asked. Then, For what?
To August sun he marked it, aloft, victor's clutch,
For the Pacific, he said.

                        Promising to write, he left,
the stone under denim underway. And this he says:
I did the lakes, the Nations, the high grass for miles,
dry lands, Badlands, the Parks burning for weeks,
false mountains

                        climbing into Idaho's shadows.
Now, mosquito-ravaged, money gone, tired of the weight
of it all, I have flung it into Alaska's Pacific, rubbed it
one last time for you, that Atlantic charm, drowned it
in water it knew

                        just ten million years ago before I
came along, Owen McReigghily, biker, Christ-bearded
my own descriptor, who pays no taxes, lives no place
but arbor, dry culvert, waddies back where mountains
have beginnings.

                        I've done my passage here, freed
Nahant Atlantic's stone to taste new salt. something
will touch it yet, burn it, shape it, clutch the warmth of
my hands where I rubbed in time,

                        grind it for stars not yet begun.

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #2: Winter 2008, Volume 1 Number 2