ELEGY FOR A CARPENTER

I first felt when I was five or six
Where shrapnel had scarred my father’s scalp
And startled, his hands never did again
Tousle my hair. A uniform vanished from the attic.

And his hands grew thick with flesh from labour.
They built homes as easy as some spun talk
And my hand was tiny in his when we walked
Through the mud about spangling houses.

Sundays saw him out with farmers, his friends.
Their hands would ruck in the firm good earth
About green shoots. Or we would enter dim forests
Spotting the white puffs of mushrooms

After shuddering storms. The winters brought a whiteness
To his hair and took him to the basement and the building
Of bee boxes. How I cursed then his thin white hair
And wished out balding under the sun’s intense witness.

There comes an awful droning from his last box
And though my words are gibberish to them
As this bee’s business is to me,
I have read the texts on how two queen bees battle

And now issues the flight from their threshold.
I keep a good bystander’s distance
From the busy swarming, the thrumming
Through narrow passage. My words prove poor tools

Now that his poor head lies underfoot where white is black.


Joe Paczuski