A Carpenter's Daughter

This memory song is late in coming.
The joiner was broken before his work
was complete; the hammer is silent now.
The saw and the rule are dusty with age,
his workbench torn out two summers past, but
I still remember the smell of pinesap and resin
and roofing tar. I am a carpenter’s daughter.

My father created cavalries of wood,
sawhorses to hold steady the workday load.
These rigid chargers of lumber, emblazoned
with chalk dust, like fierce warpainted steeds.
His children rode reckless like savages on
mounts of sticky white pine, hammersong
like hooves striking flint, ringing out around.

Across the horizon of my distant youth,
I was enthralled with my father’s level.
The forging of alignment, the truth of it,
a tool that quarters no compromise.
A carpenter trims the world and makes it
flush and planed and square, but now
the bubble is no longer between the lines.

He told me not to weep for the mighty trees
who cleaved for the axe with honor and grace;
their sacrifice sheltered softer, weaker things.
Our homes are gravestones of oak, pine and beech.
Our lives stand, their epitaphs and legacies.
The forest bore the weight of his loss, in the end
I wonder if the trees wept for him?

A grand artisan without a legend, his softwood
hands skillfully held and shaped my childhood.
He never walked with disciples, but I swear
he turned a loaf and a fish into a feast
so many times. No more than a man,
no less than a father, he lived and died
with callous-streaked fingers full of wood.