Gandy Dancer of the Phoebe Snow
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You began right in front of me today. I don’t know where you came from, patient muscles hanging loose in your soil-painted, dark-blue suit coat, one pocket ripped to a triangle, one pocket stuffed oh so properly with a coffee-filled paper-wrapped pint bottle, your thin legs nailed down into a pair of the saddest brown pants, a long-handle spade extending your arms, eyes folded over reaching for noon. Off behind you, faded to gray, jetted the rip of animate steam, coal gases; railroad track arrowing in a lake top that still does not exist. You said, “Manja,” and laughed at me, your big teeth ripe of red meat and bread, voice as loud as your hands slapping with music. You untied the red bandanna at your neck, a sun-bothered sail of red bandanna, wiped the brow under a felt hat, sucked at the papered bottle until I tasted iodine at the bend of my throat, smelled coal dust coming a talc over us, like a dry fog. It was the same yesterday when I made a v-grooved pole to hold the clothesline up, and over the fence a visitor from the Maritimes said, “You go back a long way. I haven’t seen a pole like that in years and years.” So I guess you came the way the pole did, out of the roads I’ve traveled, down lanes stuffed like chairs, past yard geographies, a long view over trees, out of some thing I was, an organic of memory, celluloid flashing of wide spaces I passed through, the odors I thought I wore or was, cannons at the edge of a distant war, colors banging their permanence tightly against the back of my eyes, pieces of the circle I find myself on, where you were a moment ago, just out the window of my mind, bearing the riddle of a melancholy whistle. by Tom Sheehan |