Chisel
calm, aware
of his own edge
but having nothing
to strike him and
make him cut,
he sat there
looking around
at conversations
he thought stupid
until the time came to go home
and return to his sharpening
in the dark. His edge
was brittle in no time.
God, he cried,
you’re a lazy craftsman.
Take me up, Lord,
and let me make a groove
in your dumb wooden world.
I need a smiting to act
as I have been forged to act.
Born in New Jersey
around 1925 or so,
certainly no later than 1930
by the style of her yellow label.
Scarred and battered,
solid spruce and solid birch —
no plywood here —
repaired cracks,
stained face,
pitted and cranky tuning pegs,
a matchbook shred filling in
the nut on the first string
to keep it from buzzing;
one bridge pin
new white ivoroid,
the rest original black pearwood
with mother of pearl caps.
None of that is important.
What’s important is how easy she is to read
when you understand
the scrubbed bleaching
under the high frets that says
blues,
the rubbed out tale
written on the back
of the steep V profile
of the still-straight
railroad track of the neck
that wails
blues,
I sang the blues
my whole life.
I keep her close,
always within reach,
never in a case.
She still sings
old and clear,
balanced and knowing,
though I can’t make her cry
the way she must have cried
in someone’s hands
for the better part
of her life —
for there must have been a better part
than this one, finding herself
with me and my amateur hands,
me with my own dents and marks,
my own damages, some repaired
and some still raw and shaking.
We work together and sometimes
it almost feels good when I set her aside
and figure we can try again tomorrow,
starting from where we left off.
She’s got forty years on me at least
and still as strong as ever.
I keep her close, with her promise
that maybe you can’t be satisfied,
but you can still keep trying.
When you’re
a hammer, he said to me,
everything looks like a nail,
and that’s how you approach
every problem:
sometimes you drive it in,
sometimes you pull it out.
I wish, a lot of the time, he said,
that I’d been born
a precision screwdriver.
I wish I’d been made for details,
been a writer like you. But I wasn’t.
I was a hammer. I did
framing twenty years,
had my own business the last ten.
I slammed
and yanked and banged my thumb
a lot. I never did the painting
and wallpapering, though I did drywall
when I had to,
never liked having to finish things
the way others wanted them, I figured
that was their job.
You, he said, you got
to do all the cool stuff, you got
to write and travel,
make stuff up, fine tune
and change things
a little bit here and there.
No complaints,
he said, I just wonder sometimes
what it would have been like,
so what’s it like?
And the Hammer
slapped me on the back
as I peeled the label
off the bottle
and studied
my nervous,
unmarked hands.
Dark Matter 