Firewood

It’s not quite the life I expected.

the winter’s four cords are scattered

around the small, towny yard,

covering the dried out grass.

Self-satisfied, admiring the juniper and punky fir, round

pile of lodgepole, the cars rush by on Broadway

and the P.A. announcements

from the elementary school drift on the air.

still, there is the October light, sharp as a scythe,

and already a little juniper smoke in the pines.

Every stick of the wood I cut myself,

that counts for something.

each pile a story in itself,

orange-capped hunters in the Maury mountains,

lodgepole rounds ferreted out of North Davis

after a freddie stopped me to look for an untagged load,

black sticks of ancient lathe kindling,

the remains of a wall built in 1917 and finally put to another use.

It beats the anonymous hiss of natural gas last winter,

wondering whether Canada or Wyoming was on the other end

of the pipe,

turning on a valve and thinking,

where does this come from?

It is good to know at least a little of where stuff comes from,

potatoes grown at Fields Farm, morel mushrooms in the Spring,

juniper splits from the Ochoco mountains.

I remember my father remembering us collecting pine kindling

in Washington park,

stopping to watch the butterflies cavort in orange clouds,

pulling my red wagon.

My stepfather throwing rounds of black oak through the brush at Cone Peak,

me loading them into the old Chevy,

munching on Fig Newtons and granola.

Instead of a vague wondering,

there is a little sorrow that once living things

must be chopped and sawed,

split and ripped,

to make this life work out.

A woodpecker’s possible home decimated,

a warbler’s roost no more.

It’s just the spilled blood made visible instead of toted up to five decimal points on a utility bill.