Poemunity — your poem community

for Maxine Kumin A cylinder of maple set in place, feet spread apart— and the heavy maul, fat as a hammer but honed like an axe, draws a semicircle overhead and strikes through the two new halves to leave the steel head sunk a half-inch in the block and the ash handle rigid in the air. A smack of the palm, gripping as it hits the butt end, and the blade rolls out of the cut. The half-logs are still rocking on the flagstones. So much less than what we have been persuaded to dream, this necessity for wood might have sufficed, but it is what we have been taught to disown and forget. Yet just such hardship is what saves. For if the stacked cords speak of felled trees, of countless five-foot logs flipped end over end downhill till the blood is wrung from your back and snowbound warmth must seem so far off you would rather freeze, yet each thin tongue torn from the grain when log-halves were sundered at one stroke will sing in the stove. To remind you of hands. Of how mere touch is song in the silence where hands live—the song of muddy bark, the song of sawdust like cornmeal and down, and the song of one hand over another, two of us holding the last length of the log in the sawbuck as inches away the chainsaw keeps ripping through hickory.

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day, I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.' The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went through. The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home. A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather— The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. And then there was a pile of wood for which I forgot him and let his little fear Carry him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him good-night. He went behind it to make his last stand. It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled—and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see. No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year's cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before. The wood was gray and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labor of his ax, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

Little soul, do you remember? You once walked over wooden boards to a house that sat on stilts in the sea. It was early. The sun painted brightness onto the water, and wherever you sat that path led directly to you. Some mornings the sea-road was muted scratched tin, some mornings blinding. Then it would leave. Little soul, it is strange — even now it is early.

It is autumn but early. No crow cries from the dry woods. The house droops like an eyelid over the leprous hill. In the bald barnyard one horse, a collection of angles Cuts at the flies with a spectral tail. A blind man’s Sentence, the road goes on. Lifts as the slope lifts it. Comes now one who has been conquered By all he sees. And asks what—would have what— Poor fool, frail, this man, mistake, my hero? More than the hands on the lines and the back aching, The daily wrestle with the angel in the south forty, More than this forever lonely round Round hunger and impotence, the prickly pair: Banker or broker can have dreamed no fate More bankrupt than this godlike heresy Which asks of love more leave than extended credit, Needs comradeship more than a psalm or surely these Worn acres even if over them Those trained to it see signs of they say God.

It turns out there’s a difference between a detail and an image. If the dandelion on the sidewalk is mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep is an image because it moves when her body does, even when a shirt covers the little thorny black sun on a thin stalk. The same way that the bar code on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail, until you hear that the row of numbers underneath are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm in a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, something activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact. I know the difference doesn’t matter, except in poetry, where a coffin is just another coffin until someone at a funeral calls it a wooden overcoat, an image so heavy and warm at the same time that you forget it’s about death. At my uncle’s funeral, the coffin was so beautiful it was like the chandelier lighting the room where treaties are signed. It made me think of how loved he was. It made me think of Shoshone funerals, where everything the dead person owned was put into a bonfire, even the horse. In that last sentence, is the horse a detail or an image? I don’t really know. In my mind, a horse is never anywhere near a fire, and a detail is as luminous as an image. The trumpet vine on the sagging fence. The clothes in the fire. And each tattoo that I touch on your back: the three-part illustration of how to use chopsticks, the four-leaf clover, the clock face stopped at 12:05.

The woodpecker keeps returning to drill the house wall. Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another. There is nothing good to eat there: he has found in the house a resonant billboard to post his intentions, his voluble strength as provider. But where is the female he drums for? Where? I ask this, who am myself the ruined siding, the handsome red-capped bird, the missing mate.

I took the dog and went to walk in the auditorium of the woods, but not to get away from things. It was our habit, that was all, a thing we did on summer days, and much there was to listen to. A slight wind came and went in three birches by the pond. A crow uphill was going on about the black life it led, and a brown creeper went creeping up a brown trunk methodically with no record of ever having been understood by anyone. A woodpecker was working out a deep hole from the sound of it in a stand of dead trees up there. And then a jay, much put upon, complained about some treachery it may or may not have endured, though most are liars anyway. The farther in, the quieter, till only the snapping of a stick broke the silence we were in. The dog stood still and looked at me, the woods by then already dark. Much later, on the porch at night, I heard the owl, an eldritch thing. The dog, still with me, heard it too, a call that came from where we'd been, and where we would not be again.

The wind flapp'd loose, the wind was still, Shaken out dead from tree and hill: I had walk'd on at the wind's will,— I sat now, for the wind was still. Between my knees my forehead was,— My lips, drawn in, said not Alas! My hair was over in the grass, My naked ears heard the day pass. My eyes, wide open, had the run Of some ten weeds to fix upon; Among those few, out of the sun, The woodspurge flower'd, three cups in one. From perfect grief there need not be Wisdom or even memory: One thing then learnt remains to me,— The woodspurge has a cup of three.

In the mud of a tire rut, we were the filaments. We said if Mrs. Agnew could make music on Spiro’s flute we said the clubs in the hands of the Chicago cops would liquefy. The trees shook with the throb of steel. What did we do to be so red, white, and blue? We were inexorable like the dialectic unraveling from Hanoi to the Jacksonian grass. We were the inebriates of vitamin C and cocaine, the daughters of the gray flannel suit. And when the shaman spread his yellow robe like the sun he was all teeth and amp and what were we?

woodstove of my childhood where potatoes cut like triangle chips were fried in manteca de marrano woodstove of lazy autumn smoke swirling away to nowhere woodstove of December evacuating the cold chill at sunrise woodstove of celebration and mourning of post-World War II Korea y Vietnam woodstove corner that kept vigil over drunken nodding remembrance woodstove corner where uncles primos compadres gathered on visits from Califas woodstove corner with a warm ear for nostalgia where Mama Ane stirred the atole and wrung her hands thumb over thumb praying for her children's children's children woodstove that witnessed six decades washing its face at the vandeja that saw western swing dancing in dim lantern flame that watched Elvis come in from across the llano strumming a mail-order Stella and singing in Spanish woodstove of the feast lamb tied up under the crabapple tree of early sour cherries ripening above the cornstalk horizon of neighbors bartering a cup of sugar in exchange for mitote and conversation woodstove of rain tenderly pouring into the afternoon and salt sprinkling onto the patio from the mouth of the porch woodstove of the nighttime crackling softly of harmonious harmonica medleys blowing before bedtime prayer woodstove facing John F. Kennedy's picture on the wall woodstove of Protestant Sundays ringing without bells woodstove of dark earth fat worms and acequias woodstove of 1960s propaganda and all the rich hippies knocking poorly at the screen door woodstove of private crazy laughter of woodpeckers pecking through rough-hewn barn timbers only to meet the sky of rabbits nervously nibbling evening away in the arroyo of the water bucket banging and splashing all the way home woodstove of the water drop sizzle of buñuelos and biscochitos and flour on the chin of chokecherry jam dropping out from the end of a tortilla woodstove that heard Mentorcito's violin bringing in the new year that saw Tío Eliseo bring in an armload of wood that heard Tío Antonio coming down the road whistling a corrido and swinging his cane woodstove of the blessed noontime and Grandma Juanita heating up the caldito woodstove of the sanctified and untamed holy spirit of the dream awake dreamers prophesizing in the beginning how the end would come of creaking trochil gates left open forever of twisted caved-in gallineros rocking in weeping April wind of abandoned orchards waist deep in desánimo of teardrops that held back the laughter of the penitente procession moving through the hills for the soul of the village woodstove of the wounded faithful proudly concealing their scars woodstove of armpit farts and bedtime giggles of pitchforks and axes under the bed in case of intruders of coffee cans filled with everything but coffee of ten cents for a cream soda at Corrina's of strawberry Nehis and a bag of chili chips at Medina's of a handful of bubble gum acá Santos's woodstove of genius wisdom dressed up as the village idiot of hand-me-down stories locked away in the dispensa of bien loco local heroes cracking homeruns Saturday afternoons en la cañada woodstove of all that and more of all that disappearing as children played hide 'n' seek in that abandoned goodtime feeling while stumbling on the footsteps of tradition woodstove that heard the fall of a people rising in silence that died of a loneliness without cure that cured itself in the company of the so many more lonely woodstove of my childhood