Patching and making-do

From Elvers by Moonlight… This is crafted writing, with the pleasing smoothness of worked wood. I hope @David Knowles doesn’t mind me quoting at length. But do read the whole post.

‘How do we, in our turn, learn to write the poems of our own existence? My, that’s a big question. I don’t have the answer. I have only glimpsed, once or twice in my life, what it might be to compose such a poem. Back in the day, I knew an old lady in the crofting township up the coast from ours whose taciturn husband had the gift. No, not the second sight or the sixth sense. He neither published nor composed poetry. Rarely sang. But he had the gift of joinery. She arranged for me to shadow him for two dark, near silent days while he patched and made do, spliced and healed the perilous roof of an old cowshed. I swept and fetched, carried and held. He dreamed of winters past and winters yet to come when the hot breath of cattle would nuzzle the rafters while the storm danced on the roof.

Poets and joiners. I get them muddled up. Their conceiving of an object which is not yet there. Measuring and measuring again. Cutting a little, pondering patiently as if waiting for divine inspiration, then cutting once more. Smoothing and matching. Dressing and offering up. The repetition of simple tasks over the months and years of a lifetime. The avoidance of sudden flashes of haste. The respect from dawn to dusk for the raw material. The wood or the words - the smell, the texture. The long decades that are laid down in the grain of a tree’s heartwood and a language’s lexicon.