Wood

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.