Tom Sheehan
Empty
My father’s room
is empty. Even
the crickets
have abandoned it,
their high-toned implications
evaporated,
their whispers even,
and give mystery to the missing.
Blue wall-
paper hangs pale
as horizons
(the thin lines of nothing
touching nothing)
yet holds a forgotten
November in place
as if paleness is a nail.
The odor in the air,
a perfectly graspable odor,
is a missing leg,
mystery of space
just below his knee,
like a broken date
or someone not coming
home again from downtown.
(When the surgeon sawed it off
he handed it to my masked wife;
that’s a touch you can’t forget
when she touches you.)
All the terminology
of touch, handshake,
backhand (I never knew
how sweet it was),
the clutching fingers
grew when eyes
gave into darkness,
the very last pressures
abounding but brittle
his arms put on me,
are like missing photographs
in a family album.
Corner mounts sit empty
on a blank page
where touch is a gap,
a lost breath,
something cornered
four ways to nothing.
(She said she put his leg
in a bag in a hospital basket.
It fell with a thud. Now and then,
I know, she collects that sound again
when a door closes in the night.)
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Tom Sheehan has three novels, two in print, "Vigilantes East" (2002) and "Death for the Phantom Receiver," (2003) from Publish America, and one serialized on 3am Magazine, "An Accountable Death." His fourth poetry book was issued June 2003, "This Rare Earth and Other Flights," from Lit Pot Press. A chapbook, “The Westering,” was issued this summer by Wind River Press. "A Collection of Friends," memoirs, will be issued in fall 2004 by Pocol Press. He has four Pushcart nominations, and a Silver Rose Award from ART for short story excellence. He has had work on or coming on Tryst, 42 Opus, Dead Mule, Elimae, Snow Monkey, Eclectica, Retort Magazine, Slow Trains, Three Candles, Eleven Bulls, A Man Overboard, Cold Glass, The God Particle, Life Sherpa, The Square Table, Just Good Company, North Dakota Quarterly, Small Spiral Notebook, Fiction Warehouse, Nuvein, The Paumanok Review, etc.
