Frost covered this decades ago,
and frost will cover it again tonight,
the leafy disarray of this woodland
now thinned down to half its trees,
but this morning I stand here
sweating in a thin shirt
as I split a stack of ash logs
into firewood
with two wedges, an ax, and a blue-headed maul.
The pleasures here are well known:
the feet planted wide,
the silent unstoppable flow of the downswing,
the coordination that is called hand-eye,
because the hand achieves
whatever the concupiscent eye desires
when it longs for a certain spot,
which, in this case, is the slightest fissure
visible at one end of the log
where the thin, insinuating edge
of the blade can gain entry,
where the shape of its will can be done.
I want to say there is nothing
like the sudden opening of wood,
but it is like so many other things—
as in a mirror,
and hit the soft ground
like twins shot through the heart.
And rarely, if the wood
accepts the blade without conditions,
the two pieces keep their balance
in spite of the blow,
remain stunned on the block
as if they cannot believe their division,
their sudden separateness.
Still upright, still together,
they wobble slightly
as two lovers, once secretly bound,
might stand revealed,
more naked than ever,
the darkness inside the tree they shared
now instantly exposed to the blunt
light of this clear November day,
all the inner twisting of the grain
that held them blindly
in their augmentation and contortion