Hands Are Wood

Come see the woodpile behind the cannery. Come through the wall to where the wood was chopped and the difficult wood was hewed. There is a short history of commotion here, where a sudden bonfire spat its surprise at the sky— a hundred feet or more the shavings swept through disturbed air, and made their own music, the music hands make, such a yellow crackle and such a thrashing in the morning. Come wait for the heavy trucks to arrive, the men in dusters cutting the twine, loading the long ghostly planks like ballast into iron barges. This will be packing for a transatlantic box, or paper for essays on schadenfreude, or timber for dollhouse dressers, or a twenty baht note for the Thai rubber trade. These matchsticks will burn whenever you strike them, and this, hack at it however you like, is nothing more than deadwood for the fire. Come see—now even the men are doing only what they were made to do.