Hands Are Wood

Come see the woodpile behind the cannery.

Come through the wall

            to where the wood was chopped

and the difficult wood was hewed.

There is a short history of commotion here,

where a sudden bonfire spat its surprise

            at the sky—

a hundred feet or more the shavings swept

through disturbed air, and made their own

music, the music hands make, such a yellow

crackle and such a thrashing

in the morning.

Come wait for the heavy trucks to arrive,

            the men in dusters cutting the twine,

loading the long ghostly planks like ballast

            into iron barges.

This will be packing for a transatlantic box,

or paper for essays on schadenfreude, or timber

for dollhouse dressers, or a twenty baht note

for the Thai rubber trade. These matchsticks

will burn whenever you strike them, and this,

hack at it however you like, is nothing more

than deadwood for the fire. Come see—now

even the men are doing only

                        what they were made to do.