Series: Odes to Tools

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.

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.