Woodcraft’s Goodly Booke, A Meditation

I. Windfalls

On the happenstance of windfall
Toppled by the hand of a stern weather
That I gathered to the wood pile for the work
The saw imposes a straight-edge discipline.
And I sling the broken limbs in a crook
One by one - and all different -
And cut them there to size:
As it is written in Woodcraft’ s Goodly Booke.

II. The Splitting

The axe-head has good weight
The balance deft, the handshake true.
And its fearsome force, a sweet vectored arc,
Pulls on me, holding hard.
The rhythm of the hurtling
And the handle in my clasp, roots me,
Like a ship’s rail does
On the tossed quotidian seas.
And finally down to the truth:
The sudden snapping split
The crack like breaking bones.
 
III. The Smell of It

It is the smell of it, then,
That blossoms pitchy there
Wafting from the sundered halves
Or mauled to shaggy fours or quintered.
Dejectedly Under swift strokes of steel
And the sight of them, their sinews,
Gaping from the cleaves
That never yet before were seen
And never again will be.
 
IV. The Stacking
 
Then to the labor of the loads
All cut and split and measured
And the diffident architecture
That I there build
Stacked wood on angled wood
Which when it stood,
Festooned between trees
My back knew it was good.

V. The Fire
 
The genii of these winter woods
Keep stanched outside my wooden walls
The night’s chill howling goblins
Whose ice-teeth gnash my panes.
Their fire, a galloping dazzle,
Paints ruddy my old cracked hands
Their spirits awhirl up the flue
Their mist, silver, on the crystalled sky.
 
VI. Prometheus
 
I read my Woodcraft Breviary
And dry my socks, mizzle soaked,
While outside I see, eyes up from the text,
The sawn ends staring back blank at me -
Tidy shelves of sightless eyes
Winking out under brows of snow.
And I know that fire grows on trees
And was stolen from the gods
Like the water, from heaven to cistern.
And I blush at once for that silly theology
With which I’ll have no truck.

From Mountain Wizard, by Thomas J. Phalen.