Matthew Nienow

The steam box is used for bending   frames and planks in traditional boatbuilding. With a match I became a man who summoned diesel from the yellow caverns of a ten-gallon jug, called the flame now hissing out the hose at the small house of  water, that rusted drum from which travels an excruciating wetness — this is what makes the body otherwise, what makes it sing. To take that which has decided on a shape, and bend, without breaking, the lengthening fibers. To give the straight thing curve. To make of  the tree a song grown long in a linseed skin, the slick hot strake waiting to become parcel of  the round world again.

gain — a bevel cut into plank ends in traditional lapstrake boat construction that allows otherwise lapped planks to lay flush at stem and transom. There’s the paring chisel’s purpose in the steamed cedar strake, its long warp laid strong against the bench, whose pocked surface is the book of what has already been made, or marred in learning’s wake —& clamped now in the jaws one is waiting for its match, for the chisel to elaborate the pencil’s scribed hypothesis, under which lies another path,& through a tilting eye the curving bevel’s made, the chisel rolling back tight scrolls of thinnest grain & what bright sleeves begin to fleece the floor; there is a lack given to the wood, some short song cut loose from the lignin’s name, that a longer & more buoyant melody be made.

The belt kicks on with a whir & the whir licks the end grain of the offcut with a hint of  hesitation. A small wind of ochre dust sweeps off the belt before the belt comes back to where it was. The whole room swells with the scent of cinnamon & desire. How imprecise the smell of desire. The wood takes on a sheen, a gloss the grain can live behind without worry of  being forgotten. A single knot blinks out of the small block and becomes the eye of a hummingbird, its beak bending around the edge of the wood, its small song captured in the annular rings. To think, this block was tossed in with the scraps. That the bird could have been lost. Or burned.

I would drive the pre-dawn dark to stake my spot to fish for dinner, to numb my hands in the ice bucket, to pluck, from the neat stack, a herring, to fit the skullcap and pierce the eye with a toothpick, the body double-hooked, my fingertips glimmering with the scales of the dead while the line whined free from the reel, and the bait arced out over the tidal current on a point in view of   the town where I lived, where I had become a man with no money, suddenly concerned only with money, for there were mouths and I had helped to make them — The eddy swirled, kept my line taut, my whole body taut though a man a few down the row laughed, sitting back on his bucket while he pulled in more fish than he could take. I hated the other men, hated the ones who caught nothing, who crossed lines or hooked gulls, who plucked even birds from the sky and slowly drew them in while they struggled and looked away, even, finally, in the hands of the man who only wanted them free. I climbed the breakwater and fished and spoke to no one. I baited my line and thought of a woman who would carry my body over the threshold of our small white house simply with her eyes because I had brought something home, for her, for us, our boys at my side while one fish was divided and indeed did feed many — (Now to sift the facts for truth): I reeked of   the sea and had nothing to show for it. Darkling saltwater for a dream and no other place to be.

is an opening, is all we can see of  the long strands that make the pathways for rays, bisecting annular rings, the most vulnerable door of  what makes the holiest of things.

Who can face the sea and not inherit its loneliness? — Olin Ivory I Gray sky, gray sea —gray mind, the man thinks. He thinks: To grow old with it and kicks a stone into the water. He mucks at the seam and it crumbles below him. A sea gull beaks a crab, flights vertically and drops it to the rocks. The man cracks with laughter, tossing a stone to a stone. II Working alone means the voice must grow louder, for who can stand to think quietly all through the day’s calculations? I cannot. I let the voice grow loud. I let the voice hum outside my body in distinguishable phrasings, and count the increments as I set the fence according to the blade. All day I stand before a blade and push things into its path. I stand aside as what is removed is whisked alongside me. The smallest particles of   what is removed thicken the air, making a dream inside which one cannot live. All day the voice is learning how to be outside of   the body. III A man is not a beach, nor is he stone, though he collects their entirety in a single thought. He works alone and his thoughts begin to smack of stone. His teeth clatter with their collection. IV A man can hold a secret between his teeth, and it will never leave his mouth, for who would listen to his wavering tune of so sad and how hard and hear anything original? He is that he is — the errand and the fool running to himself over and over only to find that even he is tired of telling about it. To grow old with it was the task, and the question always: would he last? A man can believe in the body and have no one, as though he were ghost or stone, nothing to speak at or be heard from. V All work, no pay makes a body bray. Though he may bray — Though he may bray and bray, forgive him the bit. If he tells you his secret, he will have no secret. This is how one sings a sentence into stone.