CARPENTRY

She doesn't sing. All she is, at this moment,
is pulled into her hands and eyes, as they move
godlike into the grain, to know it and make it a name.
And the dust of the workshop floats around her motion, lays on
her and her work a thin gilding, like the pollen of pines.

Sometimes, she says, I think the most peace
I'll ever know comes from making things with my hands,
just making something I can touch.

And I know
her song is what she touches: hours of her life
made palpable in a texture; the truth of her mind
measured by confluence of shape and grain. And what she feels
when she touchs the wood is what she can't touch:

Sometimes
it comes to me that all this wood is dead bodies,
That I make things with the dead bodies of trees.

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