Frostwriting

Lost, The Mercies Found in Light

by Tom Sheehan

Lost
     

Midnight of the second day
now sneaks through diamond
flakes building castles
and graves

  and snow always was
  and cold.

Somewhere in this quick
wilderness my father’s
dog has lost his eyes
to become frozen garnet,

  now two pair of eyes
  beat within the darkness.

All the life in my father’s
eyes are tears,
the odd prism’s gone
and his dog

  of countless years of keeping,
  as much a son as I, and better lately.

I feel that thud of ice upward
in both ricocheting selves, falling
to bed in bed and snow, and touch-
less perhaps but feet apart;

  one heart beats double time
  and night is a hunter of hearts.

Father’s room is diabetic
cold, the air is thinned on him,
the blankets heap like snow.
Insensitive fingers, old with tobacco,

lay yellow as wax on the comforter
remembering chevron-stripping
soon after Atlanta was rousted
one night, Nicaraguan tics,
      saber and lance, Springfields,
      and his dog.

Once I had a dog gone three days
in a storm, came home with a note
in a Bull Durham sack on his collar:
                     
  “Harry slept these three night
  with us. Ate well. Is he for sale?”

The Mercies Found in Light
         
Across this newly thickened lake
my night skates chatter up clouds
of mist as dense as the Milky Way.
Underneath, the fish disbelieve
the sudden hardness of their sky.

It is the darkness makes me love
all the mercies found in light.
Only the blind could love light
more, given one more chance;
a flake of lake ice in their eyes

with a star caught up inside.
If I dare to listen I hear an event
of ice fracture, a shore to shore
cracking underfoot, schismatic,
a round of forgotten artillery;

or my booted cutlery slashing
lines on the sugar-white surface,
crackling an electricity that divests
thinly clad wire. I am on the lake
after midnight and there is light.

Clarity speaks on cubes of air.
The wind has teeth for the back
of my neck. Only my left arch
is tired, and that from an accident
once on a night moving lightless.

What matters is I am not blind.
Light comes in spheres, or long, thin
lines, in the dusts we know of ex-
plosions. Light is the cold air
slingshotting pellets at my teeth.

It is what first comes of darkness,
and all the mercies we’ll ever know.