At dawn when the heat clicks on it feels as if the house is breathing. I leave our bed quietly to feed the cat, walk the dog and retrieve the newspaper. I am not naturally a morning person but the routine has become habit and reminds me of the practice of how I make things or do yoga or commit to afternoon walks.
In the gentle December sunlight of late morning I paged through my mother's archive searching for an article I remember stashing away. Instead I found myself lost in drafts of essays she wrote about her childhood experiences of camp, long friendships made in her twenties, and a piece about her sister and their familial relationship. These branching essays struck forgotten chords and reminded me how hard she worked to understand who she was, how she got there and where to go next. As a child I thought her knowledge and personality was solid, arrived at through natural growth like that of a tree. I am grateful to touch these pages that open into an invisible feeling of light and the vortices of empathy.
At dawn when rowboats drum on the dock
and every door in the breathing house bumps softly
as if someone were leaving quietly, I wonder
if something in us is made of wood,
maybe not quite the heart, knocking softly,
or maybe not made of it, but made for its call.
Of all the elements, it is happiest in our houses.
It will sit with us, eat with us, lie down
and hold our books (themselves a rustling woods),
bearing our floors and roofs without weariness,
for unlike us it does not resent its faithfulness
or question
Its branchings have slowed the invisible feelings of light
into vorticies smooth for our hands,
so that every fine-grained handle and page and beam
is a wood-word, a standing wave:
years that never pass, vastness never empty,
speed so great it cannot be told from peace.
"Essay on Wood" by James Richardson, from DURING by James Richardson, copyright © 2016 Copper Canyon Press.
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