Why I Write
On our summer porch at night, the fireflies hustling about in the near fields, my grandfather Johnny Igoe read W.B.Yeats to me when I was a youngster, rocking in his chair, smoking his pipe, making music and rhythm in his life, and in mine. I was, at the first of Yeats, about six years old.
"Listen," he'd say, pointing his finger up. "Hear the music. Know the sound. Feel the grab."
Johnny Igoe, spellbinder remembered.
On that porch on Main Street, a mere mile out of Saugus Center, he (and Yeats) holding forth, his voice would roll into the field where fireflies lived. His words would mix with the fireflies waiting on my bottle capture or a sense of deeper darkness where they could further show off their electric prowess. The times were magnetic, electric. I knew what attention was.
Oh, I loved those compelling nights filled with Horseman, ride by; Prayer for My Daughter or old marble heads, captivating me with a sound so Irish I was proud. I will arise now and go to Innisfree/ oh, and the deep heart's core. The lineage found me: I didn't find it, and the echoes of those nights ring yet.
But other things came repeatedly for him and still come: Johnny Igoe only ate oatmeal in the morning, a boiled potato and a shot of whiskey for lunch. He made Yeats's voice to be his own, that marvelous treble and clutter of breath buried in it, The Lake Isle of Innisfree popping free like electricity or the very linnets themselves, Maude like some creature I'd surely come to know in my own time. Johnny Igoe wrote his poems, and also yielded me Mulrooney and Padraic Gibbons out of the long rope of his memory, the knots untied all those Saturday evening of his life and mine, on that porch. He launched many of my own poems here, by the dozens, and at the end, at 97, stained, shaking, beard gone to a lengthy hoarfrost, potato drivel not quite lost in it, he gave me his voice and eyes alive to this day, sounding out in his own way.
Later, time hustling me on, in a Caedmon Golden Treasury of Poetry record I heard Yeats read his own material, three short poems, and swore it was Spellbinder Johnny Igoe still at work. I have not forgotten a word or an echo of all that.
"A Collection of Friends," memoirs, has been published by Pocol Press, and a poetry chapbook, "The Westering," by Wind River Press. His fourth poetry book, "This Rare Earth & Other Flights," was issued in 2003, by Lit Pot Press. He has five Pushcart nominations, and a Silver Rose Award from American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART) for short story excellence.
Arrangement by Tones
Silence is
the color in
a blind man's eye,
his red octaves
screaming two shades
of peace in sanguine vibrato,
a purple strike
lamenting rivers
and roads lashed in his mind,
like a crow's
endless caw-ing
of blackness anticipates nothing.
And now,
for all my listening,
it is your hand on my heart,
the mute fingers
letting out the slack
where your mouth reached,
your moving away,
a pale green evening
down the memory of a pasture.
Beneath Vines and Peach Tree
A Neighbor's Ashes
(for Herb Wills)
Vinegar Hill,
Sleepy, boot-brown
From the long heat,
Ready to firecracker,
Suddenly bustles
Like a tarpaulin
Catching a first breeze
Sweet as sherbet.
One ripple,
Air fueled, folded long
As a wave, starts its
Dance off the summit
And races shoreward.
Wind water,
Thick as suds, airy,
I swear some Atlantic green
In it, touches my feet.
You still ache
In ashes
The grapes fall on,
And the now-scented loam
Where taupe pits
Go down with ants
Into never before
Hollows.
Your sweat is a yeast
In the compost pile.
I watch where you
Stretch your gardens
Into the river, the long reach
Of your spade.
Burial for Seamen
Tonight I think of
Jonathan Diggs and how
he salts the Atlantic,
how the horse of his voice
shakes the water from the under-
neath, cracks the rocks
the small fist of Nahant
left-jabs in the ocean.
The dory
came riding in high and free
as a cracker box, the oars gone,
locks ripped away as if he had
broken all his muscles on them,
the anchor gone as Davy's gift,
not even a handful of line
left in the loop.
One incon-
spicuous mark gathered in the final
counting: JD9. It was Jonathan's
ninth boat, and the first to outlive him,
the first to come back without that
oarsman.
Seventy-year
old men do not swim all night, do not
ride on top like debris caught on the
incoming tide, do not materialize on-
shore once they are that wet.
They go down
like Jonathan Diggs, shaking their fists
at the Atlantic, shouting the final obscenity
they have waited all this time to use, know-
ing the exact moment to employ it. They send
a sound running along water lines, burst it
into sea shells
Sing it as
a tone of surf busting all September nights
when ocean listeners count for sailors.
They become the watery magnet pulling
men from inland fields, in turn are
magnetized by moon's deep clutch
on the rich pastures of the sea,
and sleep then
only in tight caves, soundless and dark
in their wearing away.
Evening, by Hawk
World-viewed incandescence; sun up
under his wings with last quick volley,
slipping through a hole in the sky, lilting
the soon-gray aura without a sound,
an evening hawk appears above us.
From Yesterday he comes, from Far
Mountains only Time lets go of. Under
wings steady as scissors a thermal
gathers, not sure the joy is ours,
or his. It flings him a David-stone
racing the Time-catch at heart,
at our throats. There is so much
light falling down from him,
from wing capture, we feel
prostrate. To look in his eye
would bring back volcano, fire
in the sky, a view of the Earth
Earth has not seen yet. In apt
darkness chasing him, in the
mountains where gorge
and river give up daylight
with deep regret, his shadow
hangs itself forever, the evening
hawk sliding mute as a mountain
climber at his work,
leaving in our path the next
hiker's quick silence, stunned breath,
the look upward on a frozen
eye and a driftless wing
caught forever.
Hermit Island, Maine
I walked
in the syrup of night
down a Hermit Island road
between snoring and 3 A.M. loving
waiting for the fish to wake.
I felt
the grace of stars
and the abrasives of sand,
the mad interplay of elements
thrusting at moccasins and eyes.
Ahead
the moon pushed
a broad blade of light
down through the perfection
of trees, a leaf scattered the delight,
a moth struggled toward the infinities.
I drank
my beer, remembering
a star fish caught hours before
on a burst of rocks, its five fingers
searching as my senses for momentary salvation.
I realized
I had no enemies,
I had no hate. I moved
out, into, and was alone
with the grace of stars
and the abrasives of sand.
Letter to the Author: tomfsheehan@comcast.net