Dear settler, dear pioneer spirit:

once the log is freed
from the rest of the trunk,
look at the grain, look at 
the potentially stubborn 
knots.  Pick your

spots, set the first
wedge, tap it in lightly
with your sledgehammer
till it’s upright and ready.

Step back.

Raise that hammer high –
your hands sliding apart,
then together, letting the natural
gravity bring it down

onto the hard, mashed-up
flat of the wedge, driving it
into the natural faults of the grain,
tearing it open until that piece falls away.

Reset, repeat

until it’s done,
until it’s all 
stacked and waiting
for its time to burn.

Dear settler, dear
pioneer spirit. Dear 
all-American sense of destiny
made manifest in brawny moves:

this has nothing to do with the wedge
and everything to do with the fire.

I have fretted
over not recalling my dreams 
until tonight
when I had one in which

two magazine-handsome white boys
laughed as they told me
they were going to steal the trailer
I was dragging up from the ditch
where it had rolled after detaching from the car
when I took that too-fast turn
up the hill;

this after I’d done all the work
of searching for it in the autumn brush
of the ruined industrial park
where it had rolled long ago
into near-invisibility
among the bittersweet
and wild grape vines
whose color almost matched
its rust and dents;

I had not yet decided how to use it
or even to scrap it or sell it but
I had had a small vision of it becoming 
the basis for a small side business to help me
survive, no clear plan really, just an inkling
that something this usable and abandoned
shouldn’t be left to rot;

so when the laughing little men
in polos and good jeans from some
ungodly expensive store laughed at me
and said they were going to take it, and what
could I do about it against them, and how did I think
this was going to end, I did not bother to ask them
why they were doing it;

they were doing it because they could, because 
they had money, because they had family to back them,
because they were whitely empowered, because nothing
had prepared them to hear no, to believe in no, 
to even understand no; this was just a game to them —
to steal the most broken thing they could from someone
as broken as the thing they were going to steal
and to laugh as they were doing it;

and as American
and as low-down
and as modern
as all this was,
as much as I wanted
to walk away
from the trailer and the boys
and maybe even my car
and go drop my shame
into the nearby river
and drown with their laughter
in my dying ears,

I could not.

The knife from my pocket
was now in my strong hand.
The pepper gel from my pocket
was now in my other hand.
I had enough, enough, and I sprayed first
intending to slash right after —

and then I woke up
wringing wet, lying with the covers
kicked off as if this were still
the Fourth Of July, as if this were still
August the sixteenth

when it was still warm in the outside world,
when I wasn’t yet fighting for scraps,
when it seemed like I might yet win.

I have often had the dream
of falling and the startling snap
of finding myself awake, 
panting, just before
hitting the ground.

There are those who say
falling in a dream
is only fatal if you 
hit the ground in the dream,

which must mean you’ll be dead
when you wake up after impact
and not before,

which only makes sense
if you don’t think about
how anyone knows all this

if those who struck bottom
died and did not come back to tell
the rest of us.

Sleep disorder researchers
claim that instead
of it being a just-missed death
that jerks you awake 

it is instead
a sudden oxygen deprivation 
in random muscles
causing a sleep twitch
called a hypnic jerk

and that is how the startled waking
at the bottom of the fall
is created.

Hypnic jerk or narrow escape:
either way, in the aftermath
of the dream I find myself 
awake with fading memory:
rushing air around my ears.
Face up, falling from a great height.
Anticipation dashed. A longing
to slip back into sleep, just to see
where I might have landed,
what that country 
would have been like.

Perhaps the myth of it being fatal 
not to wake up from the falling dream
was created and spread by those
who feared the masses’ discovery

of solid ground waiting
to catch and cradle and exalt 
those who fly in dreams
in spite of the fear of falling;
after all, who could say 
what might come from people
with no fear of their own dreams.