Winter Readings

"It might be that horses would be useful
On a snowy morning to take the trail
Down the ridge to visit Steve or Mike and
Faster than going around the travelled road by car."

– Gary Snyder, from "Fence Posts'








Mostly we walk in the shadows of previous work.
Find myself wondering nearly daily:
what was it like to hang those beaver pelts
up in the rafters in my grandfather's basement –
remember that ancient musky smell of gut and dirt?
It was down there that he made his own shotgun shells.
Lead pellets mixed with grease another smell.
Old wood of damp stairs, mallard feathers,
see the land and work with the hands.
Callouses as proof of living.

It's easy to see the same thing this morning
as we walk right up the edge of a bluff,
this old quarry road black asphalt for all that machinery
to roll up and down daily to get to the limestone
riches above.
It happened. The trailers and trucks, the backhoes,
all linked, one job in mind for years and no one
said a word – 'need the aggregate for the roads' –
while all the while the hawks circled the thermals above the power lines.
Take the judgement out; take out the questions,
take away the invisible images of the soul of the cliffs
that they pounded and chewed at for years
with those shiny silver teeth
and you gain the eye of the work – the eye of rock.

Some nights our man lay down a fire up there.
Look around at your work. Piles of limestone detritus
pushed off to the edges of the site,
that's how it will look forever. Another sip of whiskey.
Maybe a wife and three kids at home, maybe nothing.
Blue sky fading to a moonlight that now casts
out apparitions along the cut cliffs,
brand new shadows of this earth. Had to have been
flattened birches, long white glowing lines
among the silly piles. Take another sip. Smoke a cig.

Good work? Two years time. Good pay. Eye of rock.
When a grandparent tell them all of the highways you helped.
Driving yourself you look at the rip rap along
hundreds of miles of country roads
where mailboxes tip at entrances to long box houses.
Dead barns behind those. Bluffs behind still roll.

Later we'll watch a few TV shows ourselves
put on a game of uniformed athletes of some sort.
Look out the window. Manicured world.
The eye of rock still inside pulsing like an owl's
or any animal for that matter, for that's where
we used to crawl ourselves.
Feels like a scar on the dream of this world that quarry.
We fall in love with what's gone.
That man up at that fire knew a little something.
But not enough.