A week in May, dividing logs
to build my wall of warmth.
It’s pleasant work,
I get to see the insides of some trees.
The pale stuff just below the bark,
that is the sapwood, where the new cells
aggregate and grow
and put out stalks and stems and look for light.
The dark interior of the wood
is soaked in phenols, terpenes,
and sharp-smelling resins,
like the corpse of an Egyptian god-king.
That is the heartwood,
rot resisting, wormproof, dead.
A pilaster of fragrant
and unbending darkness,
suitable for building things that last.
Sixty now, and oddly stiff,
I’m still in large part sapwood,
working in a sun that comes and goes.
The days are short, the air a little cold.
The trees around seem
stuck forever in the shapes they have,
nakedly alert against the sky.
The last of the season’s geese go by,
low to the river, backlit by the sun,
honking as if their team has finally won.
I stop to watch them as they fly
and barely feel my so-called self,
this dissipating zone
of inwardness, outside.
Why can’t I simply be here, like a stone?
A year ago today, my mother died.
And here I am, exactly as before,
splitting the old wood open,
stacking it beside the basement door.
This is what grief becomes,
a branchy frame that lifts
the still-green foliage of me.
An emptiness that hardens to a tree,
the curling stem
on which my moments open,
green and soft.
The loss that holds the rest of it aloft.
