Mrs. Carriveau

Mrs. Carriveau was soon detained

a year in the county place women are sent.

Her detention loosed the gathered lips

that kept her secret secret for so long.

The secret was her husband Carriveau

with his cant hooks and his big-barred Stihl,

his rusting skidder like amphibious tank,

his F-350’s new-bought bulging tires—

they each went for a week’s wage in those days--

for cushioning each careful chosen trunk

to bring top dollar at the local mill

where smooth veneers unrolled like toilet squares.

Mrs. Carriveau was his right leg

and the left sometimes when just a day

remained to finish off the work of two.

Mrs. Carriveau knew his old machines

knew the limits of his knotted arms

and other parts--especially his brain—

she worked to make up differences between.

He knew the woods, and she knew what he meant.

To stay alive she took what he hauled out:

“J'm'en crisse” he’d extract from among

the other dirty sacres in his mind

of which she was just one.

One day Mrs. Carriveau stood winding

heavy chains that bind logs onto trucks

to satisfy the law when her old man

came raging like a randy moose in rut.

A flippant breeze had twisted one bull trunk

already on a defined arc to earth

hung it in a narrow maple crotch

that pinched it priapismically overhead.

All the effort of the felling plan

was wasted on account of her, he said,

for standing in the log yard winding chain

when he needed someone watching up.

She had made him make the widow-maker

he must now take down about like this:

he drew his elbow back like a bowstring

for the sucker punch that put her down

without a word, but as he turned to take

a second one, it was then she rose.

She pulled herself to standing with the door

of his dear F-350, where the chains

lay circled in its bed like tidy nests.

Ignition, wheel, accelerator aimed at him.

A second-degree accident, they said,

laid him on the ground like a field-pine

skidded out unlimbed, his arms and legs

all fractured like green sticks,

his neck at a right angle to his spine.

Mrs. Carriveau hasn’t much to say

except the cell is warm and dry the way

a woodbox is when kept behind the stove.

And, as for Mr. Carriveau, it’s a shame

widow and widow-maker were the same.