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After Apples, Listening They have all gone now, the fire engine-red Macintosh, under batter with cinnamon, gone to day school on yellow buses with brown-baggers, or bruised to a freckled taupe and plowed under for ransom and ritual. Some have had the life crushed out of them for Thanksgiving cup. Standing on the stiff lawn downwind of winter, I drop the first cold moon of November into a fractured wheel of apple limbs and hear the bark beg away. A pine ridge, thicker than a catcher's mitt, grabs half the wind riding off Monadnock and squeezes out wrenching cries that hang, like wounded pendants, on necks of far, thin stars. Deep in the Earth, in a thermal tube of its own making, an earthworm grows toward a rainbow trout sleeping under ice and waiting to be heard, or the last of an apple's pips still this side of the grass. It Is A Mouth, This Dawn It is a mouth, this dawn, a gaping promise, the open doors of a strange barn. Bees throb their thick aching against a sheetmetal sun and draw out survival like an ingot from the forge. All the maples wear new brash green helmets the springsmith hammered out of winter. One of them, stripped by ants, is numbed in its roots by recollection and leans into history. For the first time, at least for my listening, the geese, sprung from a southern bow, heading home to Ottowas, Crees, Blackfeet, marshes and reed grasses still frozen in the backyard of the Earth, are silent, as a hammer rests between strikes, perhaps arched as the silent horseshoe at its apex coming to be a noisy ringer.

Four Parts of Creature 1. There's a piece of you hanging like an old jacket on an old nail beside a job I never finished. 2. Twilight lashes us, which always wasn't this way, this step in another direction. Now my mouth is against your wetness and all you've shaken loose. I hear you say you have waited forever for this talk of mine. Never again will I argue for the hours we have lost getting here. 3. Listen, the mercury is resolved. Beneath my hand the Earth passes a quick shadow, recollects the distinction of a breath. A new feather finds a warm wing to grow from. The cup and the juice, the Earth and the seed, are one. The secret is the grip, by the finger- nails if need be. Mostly by a corner of the mind, an edge where a root strikes, curls like a rattler. Sometime the heart's enough. Later, past the next tense of mind, we will think of now: grass clearing its throat, ground cover ripe of ballistics, your hands at introduction. You will be a poem, a voice on a page, a leaf rising from the ashes of a winter tree, a sound from white space. If never comes we shall never forget: grass ripe, you rich, me urgent. 4. I would have gone except for your saying at the last moment how awful apart would be like discarding the apple core Eve retrieved to see if there was one bite left.

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Copyright 2006 - All Rights Reserved by Tom Sheehan (No reproduction without express permission from the author)

Letter to the Author: Tom Sheehan at tomfsheehan@comcast.net

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