Reply #23: 'A Carpenter's Daughter'

[Oeditpus Rex]

This memory song is late in coming.
The joiner was broken before his work
was complete; the hammer is silent now.
The saw and the rule are dusty with age,
his workbench torn out two summers past,
but I still know the scent of pinesap and resin
and roofing tar. I am a carpenter's daughter.

My father created cavalries of wood,
sawhorses to hold steady the workday load;
rigid chargers of lumber, emblazoned
by chalk dust, fierce like war-painted steeds.
His children rode recklessly; savages
on mounts of raw pine, a hammersong
of steel like hooves striking flint, singing out.

Across the even span of my youth,
I was enthralled with my father's level.
The forging of alignment, the essence of truth;
a tool that quartered no compromise.
A carpenter trims the world, makes it flush
and planed and square, but now
the bubble is no longer between the lines.

He told me not to weep for the trees
who cleaved for the axe; with honor, with grace.
Their sacrifice sheltered weaker things.
Our homes are gravestones of oak, pine and beech;
Our lives stand as epitaphs and legacies.
The forest bore the weight of his loss,
in the end. I wonder if the trees wept for him.

A grand artisan without a legend, his softwood
hands skillfully held and shaped my childhood.
He never walked with disciples, but I swear
he turned loaf and fish into a feast
every day. No more than a man,
no less than a father, he lived and died
with callous-streaked fingers full of wood.


—Oktoberain