In late afternoon, the first row finished, lined up neatly end to end, with mortar still soft as tree sap between them, you start the second row, cutting no slack, staggering them firmly. Night, you barely sleep -- still busy stacking things now you can't see. And in the morning, with coffee cup warm in hand, your bricks are hard and you're somehow rested, despite the busy night that hums like motors in tanks. Skin fresh to cool breeze from the south, you start your sawing. You're cutting all morning, cutting two-by-fours, then cutting your beams, then cutting your planks. Now you dump a keg of nails out on your tarp like somebody's stars spilling in a pattern across some deep black sky. In the afternoon when the sun is too hot you go upstairs and lie down, reading a novel about a man with a rake farming his own land and you spill into asleep transplanted to his land where the soil is moist and, like his, your hands are brown. When your work is done, you enter a dark hut -- like a cove -- and you build a fire and with care, warm those same hands by the potbelly iron stove you find there. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HOMING BRAVES by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON THE COMING OF WAR: ACTAEON by EZRA POUND A CELEBRATION by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT by ANNE BRADSTREET JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY (FROM A WESTERNER'S POINT OF VIEW) by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR |