Here in the dark, the scent of forest
that grew the wood the grandfather
hewed to build the house this kindling
is meant to heat. Cedar, birch,
and pine piled high, splintered
by the resolute axe cleaved
into the block out back.
Consider the man’s endurance:
each dawn leaving tracks in the snow
to cut wood as his girls
slept in their beds, and turned,
year by year, into women,
into mothers, whose children
now appear in the frosted windows
of the house he built, phantoms
behind the icy glaze of their electric age,
children who know nothing
of the axe’s weight, its clap
and echo off a future fogged
from view by time that death
deprived him of long before
their births. The children peer
through the glass at me,
as I fill my arms with fuel
to feed the furnace, as he did,
winter upon winter, in the half
century he worked this land.
Listen: he once held
in the palm of his calloused hand
my wife’s tender skull
when she was too small to speak,
too small to know
her grandfather loved her.
Before he died, he asked
to be left alone, to spend
his last hours in prayer.
We mustn’t forget
he who left behind this shed
and all the heat soon to warm our bones.
