Better than all power tools
is the socket wrench:
its accommodating nature
its chrome-plated steel
its handling of torque.
It can make a complete revolution
from the smallest arc
& as if time could turn
in either direction
with the click of a lever
the past screwed down
the future loose
a spring-loaded finger
clicks against
the gearwheel’s teeth.
this is Sarah’s fault
Back when all angels were male,
the hammer was the first
perfect androgyne.
Mounted on a pegboard,
it still looks almost aerodynamic,
poor thing.
This is no claw, but a pair of legs
strong enough between them
to give birth to nails.
Or rails that forgot to run parallel,
converging on a vanishing point
that’s much too close:
the train’s stuck in station
& the hammer keeps trying to hop
on its one flat foot.
No longer walking
the straight & narrow,
no longer restricted to the harsh
amens of service,
now it’s your turn to be held still
for the sawing of some
effete bow, generations removed
from any kinship with arrows.
But you’re free!
And this song of yours
might otherwise
never have been heard.
You put your whole body
into it, still ascetic,
but now for the cause of art.
There’s a sweet spot, the street
musicians say, & they find it
in you. Where the heart might be,
systole & diastole in perfect balance,
if you were more than cartilage.
The pure tone floats up
through two octaves of rejoicing
at your deliverance
from lumber.
Or is this grief?
Eohippus of the truck family,
divergent offspring
of wheelbarrows,
what led the hand truck
to stand on its head
& press its nose to the ground?
What could it possibly
have learned from the worm
& the tons of dirt
that pass through
a worm’s stomach?
How to let fall, perhaps,
boneless as hope.
How to take its time.
Stack truck,
sack truck,
bag barrow,
trolley,
it tips backward with alacrity,
trusting in vinyl grips
& ball bearings.
Its faith moves refrigerators.
Like a rowboat, it makes
its pilot also
face away from
the direction they’re going:
blind faith must be shared
in order to work.
The job over,
I return the hand truck
to its spot under
the barn forebay,
between the Ford dump truck
& the old wheelbarrow,
no longer red, on which
so little
now depends.
Digging with a shovel
always makes me hungry.
It’s too much like a spoon, I suppose,
& the soil too close
to food here: heavy, brown,
& as full of foreign objects
as any stew. The shovel
is both tongue & tooth
on a white ash body
twice as big around as a broom.
I love groundbreaking,
holding the handle out like
a dance partner, momentarily solemn
until the first absurd little hop
onto the top lip of the blade
& the fast ride down, barring
a sudden & jarring contact
with rock or tree root.
I love cutting sod
& setting the shovel aside
to worry the dirt free from each clump.
I love giving the earth
a new — if temporary — mouth
& listening for the harsh syllables
of rock on steel.
I even like jollying the blade
around some impediment
that threatens to snap the handle,
feeling the thing budge & loosen
& at last let go,
& the shovel cradles
its unlikely prize,
sharp-edged & slick with charisma:
a tool nobody’s invented
a use for yet.
This hatchet hasn’t bitten
through a neck in twenty years.
When we raided poultry,
it was in weekly use,
& also had regular dates
with the bench grinder:
a grating hiss, & a bright
new smile would open
in century-old rust.
The back of the head flares
into a hammer,
lending heft & balance
to this almost-cross
& making it easy to hang
from a pair of nails.
In a museum in Pittsburgh
I saw a hatchet
that was also a peace pipe
with a bowl opposite the blade
& the handle drilled out:
a two-faced tool for political campaigning.
Whether depriving one’s opponents
of their fleshy skullcaps
or making the circuit
of a smoke-filled room,
its true role was to mime death,
to undergo burial,
should diplomacy demand it,
its windpipe stopped up with dirt
in a grave shallow enough to allow
quick disinterment.
A sacred thing, meant to circle
from role to role.
A hatchet can even carve
its own next body,
the model for which —
as Confucius once pointed out —
is always frighteningly close.
A pair of old jeans —
I amputate both legs
with a pair of scissors.
*
I’ve cut myself on paper,
on grass blades,
even on certain sharp words,
but never with scissors.
*
One on a shelf in the basement
beside the string,
another with the craft paper,
& a third nestled in the sewing cabinet
among spools of thread:
We are rich. We have three pairs of scissors.
*
Every schoolkid grasps
the concept of a balance of powers
thanks to fist rock, palm paper,
& peace-sign scissors.
*
Mothers worry about
leaving their children unattended
with a left-handed pair of scissors.
*
The raccoon going through
the new trash on the riverbank
is delighted to find a shiny orphaned half
of a pair of scissors.
*
When I come into school wearing glasses
for the first time,
the other kids show me what I look like
by peering through the handles of their scissors.
*
I’m walking as quickly as I can,
stiff-legged,
mindful of the scissors.
As a bucket ages,
its galvanized surface
takes on the look
of new ice — that blue-
white jigsaw puzzle —
or a flock of cranes.
Something in its make-up
clearly rebels
against its type-casting
as a mere container
or temporary conveyance.
Even half-full,
for example, the handle
cuts into the hand.
People rarely think
to store a bucket
upside-down, so when
the bottom rusts through,
it can at last retire
& start life over:
a planter
for marigolds
on top of a stump
in a crew-cut lawn;
a transportable target
for rifle practice;
or hung on a nail
in the garden shed,
a home for wrens.
They line it
with grass & weeds
& perch burbling
on the rim,
bobbing up & down
on spring-loaded legs,
drawing from
an inexhaustible well.
Metal claws of the beast
we would much rather
be descended from —
no wimpy swinging in trees,
no equivocating opposable tine —
whether pitching hay or turning soil
their purpose is the same:
to bite what they cannot chew
& carry what they cannot keep.
There are forks also in roads,
in creeks & in tongues,
but for them
everything remains open.
How ironic then that the man-made fork
should epitomize inflexibility:
insurrectionary bedfellow of the torch,
stoker of digestive fires,
guard’s goad in an underworld
we hope never to descend to,
minimal lightning that we are,
tree gone wrong.
If the part that screws
is the head — this X-
shaped tip — then
the other end must be
tail: the shaft rooted
in transparent sun-
colored plastic like
an insect in amber.
And considering how
the power drill
with screwdriver bit
has replaced it,
this might as well be
a relic from
the Mesozoic.
The tip attracts
anything steel, but
can only solve for x,
descending into
the head of the screw
like a spirit
into someone possessed,
spinning like a purpose-
driven whirlwind
in a desert of wood,
inclining ever so slightly
toward magnetic north.
Brass doorknocker
for a house without a door
downward dog
always on point over the same
obvious quarry
flightless rocket
leaded with failure
pendulum made
to mark eternity
one still moment at a time.
This time, there are no magic beans.
Every man-jack turns into
an acme-threaded beanstalk.
The hound under the porch
noses at the growing
hoard of sunlight
as the old house
climbs groaning
into the sky.
Tape that doesn’t stick, reliable as the pronouncements of some close-lipped neighbor who never goes beyond the corner of the block. Tape that bends to follow the flank of a fish. Vacuuming dried begonia petals from a window ledge, I accidentally suck up a snail shell, one of three I’d had on display. It rattles briefly down the long hose & is gone. Shall I open the Shop-Vac’s fat belly & dig for it in the slag heap of dust & dead beetles? No, I’ll look for another. Snails in the woods are subject to continual Rapture — their empty shells are legion. Ditto for the ladybugs that litter every corner now that winter is past.
In an old house like this, nothing is square. The yellow blade of the contractor’s measuring tape was out of its case more often than it was in, checking the height of the ceiling every few feet. Either come in or stay outside, our exasperated parents used to tell us. On rainy days we’d spiral from the basement to the attic, leaving half-finished sketches to go try on costumes from a huge carton of old clothes.
Tape that doesn’t stick, like the tongue of snake. I had a friend in grade school who particularly enjoyed this game of dress-up. We’d switch between oversized suits & oversized gowns without a second thought. One time we even dressed as a newlywed couple & paraded downstairs to show my mom. I don’t recall her sharing our enthusiasm. As far as I was concerned, it was adulthood we were parodying, not gender roles per se. We laughed to think what kind of fop such clothes would actually fit. But now I can’t fit into my own jeans from five years ago, & as for my erstwhile friend, some neighbor said he came out of the closet as a homosexual & moved to Florida with his lover, not necessarily in that order. I know if I were gay, I’d leave this area and never look back.
Tape that doesn’t stick. Yesterday morning I wrote 25 lines, dense with slant rhymes & alliteration, & in the evening I retracted them & left just two words on the page, a fragment of an ode:
Steel
snail.
The scythes are emissaries
from a country
that no longer exists.
They have only each other
to converse with now
that their translator
the whetstone went off
& joined the knives.
They huddle together
in corners, nested esses
long in the tooth
but still as fluid
as the staff of Moses
at the exact moment
it shifted into an asp.
Do you remember,
they murmur, how
the crowds
would lose their heads
& stand like soldiers,
stiff, when the wind
moved through?
1.
The carpenter’s plane glides
through a sky of wood,
no propeller but the knob,
no tail but the tote,
no landing gear but the mouth & the blade
& no chance of flying but the flat steel frog.
2.
The carpenter’s plane touches down
& down. Chips curl in a wave
that never stops breaking.
No one ever really escapes;
all planes are bound to the planet.
The only route out leads farther in.
3.
When the carpenter’s plane got to Japan
it began to work in reverse:
there’s always more power in the homeward pull.
You go out hungry & come back
digesting fragments light as air,
dangerous with the scent of new surfaces.
This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
Order from the publisher or
Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's, where I'm doing a reading on April 10.
"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
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