January 8th: Thoughts on My Father’s Shovel
barely above zero the snow,
what fell and fell and fell
the afternoon long and on
into the night is gone
hard, thick as his work
hands, hands the wood end
of a shovel’s more forgiving
of than a woman gone sour
during the work day. what’s
best for me and seeing is this:
when my son and I walk in
old antique stores, among
the rows of old farm tools,
their cracked handles, their
rusted blades: sickle, scythe, hoe,
all those that open a hole in
their coming into home, grass
or soil, hole after hole the size
of the completed arc or thrust. My
father’s post hole diggers. His
three tined hay rake he’d take
to the barn to pierce away a day’s
worth of shit and hay, and that
square ended shovel that hung
by the shed door, a handle
hard as the cow’s horn and just
as smooth. All those tools
are dust now and rust , ash
in the hole they buried the house in
after it fell, smoldering, to
their feet. They patted the top
the way I’ve seen my grandmother
pat the top of her potted roses,
tender as a clean dressing
change only my mother could
touch when my father came home
after weeks and weeks away
and no hand to speak of just
mounds and mounds of gauze
and pins that stuck out like tv
antennae. It was winter then too,
and bitter. All his tools went
still, cobwebbed in corners,
their smooth handles the first
girl or boy I ever touched. Imagine
how much warm friction it takes
to wear down a new tool to the like
of a lover? Imagine all that
momentum. Start at the reach, then
at the grasp, and then, at the hip,
pull back the favored foot and as
the arc perfect, the strobe and stroke
like a piston in the palm
the only oil your heat and blood
and time. Imagine coming
home to that.
After that fire I never saw
any of those tools again. Until one
December and my mother’s urn
and the crumbling frozen earth.
And the grave wasn’t deep enough,
the engine on the backhoe wouldn’t
start. Shit but it was cold up there
in the old garden. Smoke below
in the channel, you know, the salt
water warmer somehow than the air.
And a man came back from the cellar
of the new house with a shovel.
Grabbed the first thing I saw
he said and I watched man after man
widen and deepen, three feet
up to and past their knees, then
the hip. The shh shhh lifted dirt
was all the loud we’d need that day.
That with a saved shovel.
No gloves. The blond, almost white
soft hard handle laid next to
the blond almost white soft hard
box of ash. It could’ve been almost
comical if it wasn’t. Recovered
from a fire to dig after a fire. Imagine
the tools we save thinking
some day we’ll need, some day
even just touching, after all
those years using, all those years
fallow, all the fires and demolitions
and severed hands and hills to climb
and shit to shovel
and holes to dig. Imagine.
We touch it and it’s almost,
even in December, alive, almost
ready to pull in a lung of warm
dusty air and sigh.
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