Brief Cases Short Spans by Tom Sheehan

Nearly Saugus When I was Young
by Tom Sheehan

It is always nearly Saugus
No matter where I am,
Coming from anyplace, going to,
Sure as snow or crocus after
Or the clock turning on,
Sure as clam flats on air
And kelp bubbles breaking down
Under confection of dry salt
And the river knowing its wares
Through nine-foot cat-o-nines
Standing ripe as fire arrows.

Saugus announcements are made
With conviction all along the line.
In Linden, just south where
Four roads cross themselves neutral,
The sad, gray Hawkridge Brothers
Steel Company building lays its
Washboard face to the sun
And brings back old Mondays
And mother's sad red hands
Twisting denim almost dry,
And pain not quite touchable.

There is the blunt realism
Of the awesome bomb crater
Where the stone crusher
For years has harvested
The neat beehives of pulverized
Earth bone you cannot see over
Even if you were laddered.
Only the sea is past it,
Occasional sails, slow freighters
Like dominoes on the horizon.
Nothing to look for except Outward,
Past Revere and the dream beach.

Linden talks about Saugus
As you pass through its gauntlet
Of rail-side steel, neat square
Deliveries of girders, building guts,
Lally columns, T-bar stock stacked
Parallel to rust, inhibitions of trade,
Bankruptcy or intestate dreams;

And over there, where the earth
Has a mouth you cannot believe,
Where all the dead you've known
Could hide for a hundred years,
Where granite screams downward
From pent house dynamiting,
Where a bomb blast could run out
Of its own echoes all Saturdays,
Where dust reaches for the millennium
And ledge vibrations last all week
And the Earth talks in broken windows
And plastered ceilings sneer wall to wall
Like lunatics on yesterday's back porch,
Saugus says it's here.

Lynn announces, too,
Though on the other side
And aches at the touch
Of a shoe last found cheaply
At a Saturday yard sale.
Lynn has walked the border
Only in dead winter when the river
Zippers the towns together
At a barometer's instigation
And thermometer's direction.
The parts meet where industry
Heaves upward red mickey spires
Erecting at dollar signs,
Government contracts, defense
And offense better planned
In a Manning Bowl locker room.

Lynn says hello to Saugus.
I wave back, the tracks
Of the Linden Branch walk under
My feet like I am skipping rope
And the cinders from a thousand
Dead engines and more Pullmans
Than you can shake a fist at
Litter the way onto Saugus
Even where the river collapses
Under the State Theater
Where now centerless grinders
Reel on like old serials
With week-long after-tastes.

No matter how I go at Saugus.
By Linden or Lynn, Schenectady or sin,
Collegiate enterprise or business boredom,
By rock slabs and earth holes
And ores crossed in a man's mind
And guard rails narrowed to infinity,
Nothing prepares the way better
For coming home than the flotsam
Freed upon the air, old friends
Cornerwise on busy days,
Old train whistles falling across
Donkey Field chockfull of October,
Where Halloween goes orange
And shaggy-toothed and waxy,
For nothing ever said I would ever
Write a poem about coming here
To read a poem about going there.

From the Quickening
By Thomas Sheehan
ISBN 978-1-929763-39-9
210 pages at 17.95 paperback
Pocol Press
6023 Pocol Drive
Clifton VA 20124

Quickening: to make alive; to make sharper; to shine more brightly. As with all his writings, Sheehan's latest book of 19 short stories features his signature prose that is sharp, shining with life. I can't explain my reaction, but reading Sheehan's work often brings a tearful response. It's the joy of the environments he creates, the life in his characters, the sudden jarring shock of life's despairs and realities, and the words he uses to entice and enthrall readers.

In "The Emergence of Slow Purple" for example, a widower returns to his home town a hollow shell of what he was once. He's given up on ever being whole again, until he meets a woman who insists her name is Slow Purple. His reaction to the woman's essence is strong, immediate, hopeful: "The name, I thought immediately, came with colors attached, a host of them, ablaze in intention, sunlight and moonlight, a bloom in a side yard a whole house lives for, the air filled with a suggestion of simple purple essence, presence of the violet, yet a soft bloom, the coy lavender of it."

The ending of "Fourth of July Homecoming" is an unexpected surprise and not what the three 12-year-old friends planned. The object of their celebration is the shell of an old mill beside the river: "So Snag and Chris and Charlie B came together on the specially appointed night, the national holiday, and crept up on the backside of the Old Scott's Mill, closed tight as an angry man's fist, sitting there beside the old, slow Saugus River. It was a mill as marked as time itself, whose existence seemed to transcend the town and its beginnings. Now and then it became a shell of nacre the way an early bronze moon could make it eerie and distant and out of this world. It was a piece of another time, another dimension, for none of them could begin to imagine the gallons of workers' sweat that had seeped into the floors of the structure for parts of two centuries." The ending is typical Sheehan, weaving past and present together in a touching paean to humanity.

Those brief examples from two out of nineteen stories can't begin to provide a proper review. Through prose that takes on a life of its own, Sheehan creates serenity out of loneliness and crafts triumph from deep sorrow. He builds quirky or greedy or heroic characters from bits of memory and coaxes readers into loving them. These are the gifts of a skilled wordsmith, and Thomas Sheehan is certainly that. Highly recommended.

Review by Laurel Johnson