I.
Our dream awakes as tangled, knotted string
on pounded stakes of branches broke and stacked
It takes a day to find flat stones to pile
around the stakes and hold the markings straight.
Stubby shovels, blunt for digging, dig
despite, and the pickaxe-handle splinters,
leaves two stiff points with a hole between,
still good for poking stubborn stones to wedge
dull blades behind but not for ditching out.
Foundation is a problem but not
the only one.
Reference-readings twist our overhang,
shift the slanted angle of the sun
off by eleven degrees. We ignore revision,
keep on building, wrong.
Sixty-foot firs and a couple of tall spruce
felled and hauled, a harvest in three days
by one big fella with a bigger saw
and an old, bulling skidder ditching mud,
plowing troughs uneven in the woods,
all the torn-off branches turned to tilth.
Slicing at the mill we never see
only a trailer of sided, measured logs,
and green lumber-boards that smell of pitch
delivered just as snow is on the way
and friends, put on to pile logs into walls,
chainsaw window-holes and frame a door,
bracing the whole thing up with six-inch spikes
as autumn turns to winter in a day.
We sledge an iron burner into place
lacking time for more as first flakes fall:
four windows and a door without a roof
inside a giant folded freezer-bag
open just enough for breathing in.
The winter’s fuel is green. We burn it, though,
and drink from plastic jugs we lug uphill.
Behind the stove we wash in dirty snow
barely melted in an unplumbed iron tub.
Why then does the spring ice turn to mud,
the logs shrink, making open cracks between,
the plastic leak and toilet overflow,
the house convulse with each advancing step
falling apart undone?
You claim a shadowed corner, head in hands,
dumbed by twisted knots and flaking bark
hatching forest crawlers.
II.
So it is left and I alone
return
to hear the floor-boards screech at night
like tree-ghosts caught in crooked cracks
and choking around each pounded nail.
It’s last-resort machines that save the place.
Backhoes claw out rocks below the floor,
loaders dump the tiny stones that sink
and turn to solid ground the muddy ditch.
Guns drive nails in shingles over gaps,
secure the windows south, east, north, and west
and even in mid-January a tent
of tarps with flaming kero-heaters cures
the poured cement that holds the floor joists up
finishing the argument.
III.
Then there are the insides to adjust—
for they are empty, all, and needing time
for water pipes and wires between rough logs,
caulk and flooring closing all the cracks,
and doors, inlaid with glass, that open in.
Closet, chimney, central stairs, and porch,
laid out gridlike, tightly radiused,
plumb and solid as trust.
IV.
Now I have been silent long enough.
Can you not hear the chosen careful words
that say it’s not eleven off-degrees
or spiders incubating in the bark?
Words still are too flimsy for remarks
that needed making then: thick roofs shelter
sleeping, windows all around preclude
imaginings of worms in forest-slough.
When winters come these days, I let them in.
The needled trees southeast have all been dropped,
the gnarly maple branches spread out buds
to manufacture sweetness every spring.
The only shadows grow from tall, straight trunks
and moonlight bouncing up from snow beneath.
Morning sun is red as dogwood twigs
keeping color now despite the cold.
It back-lights every frostflake on the glass
of this old jar I’m in the middle of,
this house, this compromise of out and in.
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