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Welcome to my paperless poArtry and poetry pages. Since composing this Home page in October 2008, I've added a few more pages, clickable under Navigation to the left.
For links to more art and poems at other sites, please scroll to the end of this page.
Thanks!
The five poems on this page are
DELIVERY
CLAIRE'S TREE
CARQUINEZ FROG
IRONIES AT THE DMV
ENCOUNTER ON I-80
This mysterious Santa Fe painting by Michigan artist Mary Reusch provoked a small ekphrastic tribute below.
 DELIVERY
after Mary Reusch's painting, "Inside the Kiva Inner Door, Inner Light"
What glows so much that its identity mystifies me
Makes me think of a heavenly newspaper delivery
Makes me wonder whether I could read about the dead
Not their obits as in our newspapers
But their doings as related in this dispatch
Tell me please that such a medium exists
That even if on earth our newspapers
Are dying
The dead have not discarded theirs.
For my granddaughter Claire's seventh birthday in October 2008, I sent her this poem written seven years ago when visiting her and her family in Michigan.
CLAIRE'S TREE
Through a window wet with rain I see a row of cypress sway. They mark the nearby neighbor's lane a minute’s walk away.
I hold my infant grandchild, Claire. While watching from our kitchen spot, we sway the same in our cool air. October here is not that hot.
Though I’ve no leaves for her to munch, she holds me like a koala bear who’s found a eucalyptus notch that she’s prepared to share.
While wind and water swirl outside, I shift from one leg to the other. I’m the traveling tree she rides,
her just arrived grandmother.
Here's a long ago poem I still like.
CARQUINEZ FROG
A frog near a pond, on a smooth stone, not moving,
I lie in bed under a leaf on a hot morning,
waiting for a flyspeck of desire to prod me to action.
My pond is the Carquinez Strait, at least a mile from here, at least an hour's hopping, but I remember a closer pond, empty in the next room, the clawfoot tub.
I'll start the water in it, rub the mud from my thinking, and soak until I’m human. The two poems that follow are from my previous AOL homepage and also appeared in the Crockett Signal.
IRONIES AT THE DMV
"Perfect score," she beamed, looking up from my DMV exam. "Blue eyes, brown hair" the other clerk said, sharing my stats, ignoring the gray and buying the figure I gave as my weight, which let me leave, confident in my abilities,
until I couldn't find my car without asking a stranger to direct me to the store whose parking lot I'd used.
More attuned to the printed page than to the real world, I combined the two in a dark cartoon when I chanced to witness a passing Prius whose driver blew a cloud of smoke from the cigar he chewed.
ENCOUNTER ON I-80 From the back of a Berkeley Farms van a painted Holstein looks at me. She seems black-and-white sure of her place in the universe. As we roll down I-80, I talk to her through my windshield. She’s a silent metal shimmy among thick-trunked trees. Her eyes are meltingly real. I am reassured by her bovinity. I inform the Holstein, who keeps a watch on me, that I’m on my way to a latté, a drink of steamed milk rich in calcium, and that its espresso with flavonoids is also healthy. I call the latté my medicinal libation. As the Berkeley Farms van pulls away, I thank the silent Black and White for my upcoming milk and caffeine fix. It couldn’t exist without her adorably lovely coy cowness, now disappearing into the distance. © Sherry Sheehan
LINKS FOR MORE ART WITH POEMS
Poet Suzanne Bruce and multimedia artist Janet Manalo's ekphrastic site is here
Jody Mattison posted my "Archetype" to her wonderful Nude '03 at
For Michigan artist Mary Reusch's site, where many of her portfolio paintings click into poems by her Michigan poet Ed Haworth Hoeppner and by me, please click on
John Rowe, fellow cow-loving poet, has a page devoted to bovine poems; John resides at
More than two dozen of my small poems to big art by various wonderful artists are at the site run by Joel Fallon, Benicia poet laureate 2005-2008.
http://poetrymatters.150m.com/index_files/pages_files/sheehan.html My poet laureate page at Ed Dewke's FlakeHQ (established 1996) includes three poems with Robert Chapla paintings and one with a Judy Molyneux painting.
Ed continually updates his extensive and searchable site with new info about psoriasis delivered with surprising humor.
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Please let me know what you'd like or not like at this site by emailing me at slsheehan@aol.com
Thanks!