11/12/2017 Poetry by Joey SheehanI Knew I Could Live There I wouldn’t know you if I saw you now and time goes inland on an endless tide. We could have gone anywhere but wandering. I was wounded then and scared against the skin of some foreign love still unformed in the water of your poems. I loved you because I knew I could live there in the wreckage of the quietest moments. No one ever asked what you had been through. I depended on you to balance me in the seasonal patterns of suicide and political upheaval, in the roses growing in the storm’s rise, in the wonder of listening to the inward depths of gravity and motherhood. We were falling as the flame burned through and no joy was born but the vision given by the poetry of distant countries and some weeping pilgrim with a voice to sing with. The No Future Years Our histories are marked with the pathless trail of wishes and pictures of Paradise promised to the God fearing so many pools of tears might bleed into looking for a pulse in the symbols, the crooked sidewalks, splashing stars, the crack of matches against cigarettes, the mountains of powder, our heads smashed in. These clubs and galleries picked you out of a crowd and that was that. I never paid the prices this scene cost you and the streets remain places the morning would rather not see. The city sees through you like secrets kept in hollowed out bibles collecting memories from what the edges have forgotten. Bettie Page Bangs What we do is secret only after we’ve done it and the morning breathes down like an unabridged journal or a suicide note the space between us is trembling and your absence is reflected in the murder rate I can hardly stand the music here and the bright lights shining live nude girls in place of starry skies in place of open spaces You were working as a dominatrix then with a beauty common to the nature of our symptoms like the summer skies of Dundalk like my brief infatuation with heroin that slipped away before I met you and all this I knew was bound to happen someday and you were already leaving Baltimore Street for the fashion industry and the contemporary art scene in New York but I’ve stayed clean since Stages of Prayer I could collect our creations of the past in quotations painting the fluctuating states of judgment transformed into the cupped hands of Grace. I relapsed into a whirlwind of knowing the feeling of the rain outside. I thought it was only myself that was gone the way the streetlamps come to signify something deeper, the hurt going in to bring you into me, the unchangeable poverty of faith. I remember you now in the center of the silence in the miracle of nightfall. Your simple eyes of blue in the wheel of time. Your secret language in the flames of the pentecost. This life of mine stretched to a crucible of passing mentions of God’s name. I wish I could be Catholic again in the perpetual motion of all that might ascend into the songs of the women mystics throwing night onto the symbols of marriage. You’re not aware of your beauty, the words form a picture of you standing among the sacraments, the law of gravity that bleeds the adoration of the holy women surrounding you, their tears forming from the edges of the cross of Christ. This is the life that’s been created in the garden of changeless mornings. ![]() Bio: Joey Sheehan is a poet and essayist from Baltimore, Maryland. His work has appeared in Alien Mouth, Five:2:One Magazine, and The Cerurove. His first collection, New Queer Cinema and Other Poems came out locally in 2015. He is a graduate of University of Baltimore's creative writing MFA program. Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2024
Categories |