BY CODY SMITH
for Jonathan Johnson
They’re both better when someone shows you how
to love them, and so we took a Saturday to cut
a rick of wood, the two of us driving up to Sandpoint
from Spokane in my wife’s Mazda, a chainsaw in the trunk
wrapped in dirty clothes. He pointed from the passenger seat
toward his memories just off the road: this is the logger
bar where I’d write. This is the land I wanted to buy when I was kid.
When the red suspenders are pulled over the shoulders,
it’s time to work, and we took turns with the chainsaw
and wood maul. I fell into a rhythm, whistling
When the Roll is Called Up Yonder even though
the two-stroke engine swallowed the tune. The whop
of the wood maul shook the veins of my arms;
the weight of the chainsaw pulled apart my back.
When the sun threatened to drop, an October wind chilled
my clothes wet with sweat. Just before we lost the light,
we walked up the tram to the cabin he built for him and Amy
to raise a daughter by candlelight. We walked the field
to stand on a rock, to hold open the barbwire fence
for each other on our way to the ridge.
Everything my hands touched, his hands had held in time, too.
Sawdust in my beard, in his long hair,
sawdust in the laces of our boots. We shook
what there was to shake and drove back
home trying to remember poems.
He told me once that everything’s an elegy,
and I’ll tell you, reader, that it’s true,
that our own love quickens the leaving.
That night heading home, lights in the valley snuck up
before I remembered William Stafford’s poem about rivers.
When I think of Idaho now, I think of diesel fumes
stirring the smell of wet evergreens, the blaze
of larch on the mountains; I think of the grit
of sawdust rubbing my heels raw,
the high cheatgrass scratching my palms,
the sugary ammonia of sweat-soaked shirts dried
in the dusk breeze carrying chimney smoke.
Nic and I burned through the wood that winter
and left the Northwest after two years
taking nothing with us except a few books and pictures,
baby clothes to keep in a box. I stuffed into the trunk
the last log he and I cut and drove it down
to the lower Mississippi River Delta
where what little my people have kneels to rot.
Cody Smith is the author of Gulf: Poems (Texas Review Press). He is the 2018 Mississippi Review Prize and 2019 River Styx International Poetry Prize winner. His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.