In the morning — this morning — I opened a small red notebook and commenced to write.
And what I wrote was nonsense: the disconnected fragments of a week that had gone by stressfully; the insistent kneading of a cat’s claws on my leg; the refrigerator hum that has turned, by some distressing trick of the appliance’s inner workings, into a roar.
The words fell, incoherent, and I felt a dullness like the dullness of being caught in a steady rain, miles from home, no umbrella or weather-proof outerwear. All there is to do is keep on walking, so you keep on walking; the words fell —
but in a rhythm eventually.
At last, I opened myself up to them, black scrawls spiraling off my pen, words like wood beneath a whittler’s knife, but not like the block itself, slowly becoming both less (of itself) and more (of the thing he is carving),
but rather like the delicate curlicues,
shavings gathered in a pile by his feet
as he carves
on a stool
on the packed dirt
by the cabin’s door
in a gray sunriseless morning.
Words like shavings falling,
and left, when he has done
to be scattered by the feet of the squirrels skittering through
and by the wind that whispers through the trees (who incline their heads in mourning.)
Left to be carried over the fields to the trail I walk, a quarter-mile off, in a dull rain. And I (because my head is down already) look down and see a bit of curled wood, which, for no reason in particular, puts me in mind of a man, alone in a gray dawn, at the very beginning of his story.
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