Packing Wood

(for my brother)

i.

In the photo, I’m four, wide-eyed,
with blonde hair chopped off like a bowl
by my mother, shadowed in the foreground.
My arms are piled high with wood for the cook-stove,
chin pressed into the sticks
to keep them from falling.

My father, handsome, young,
looks into the lens
with the smile that will etch lines so deep
he’ll carry them even in mourning.

ii.

Early spring, wet snow falling.
My father and I work in silence
at the top of the hill
that stood sentinel over the farm
for four generations.
He chops the strings off a bale,
spreads the loosened straw,
adds kindling, then small wood.
He turns to me where I stand
in the back of his pickup.
I’m wearing his old lumberjack shirt
and my high-heeled leather boots.
I grab an eight-foot log,
hold it tight as a lover to my chest,
heave it to the side of the truck-box.

He takes the logs from me,
arranges them one by one on the pile,
the ends just so, trusting no one else to do the job right.
He pours diesel fuel over the pile and lights it.
He’ll keep this fire burning for three days
to thaw six feet into frozen ground
so the men can come and dig.

He smiles at me, glances away
as tears come to his eyes: "Look at us.
Still packing wood
for your mother."

^

Biography

Carol Thornton is a student in the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing program. She has published poetry and fiction in England and North America. She is also interested in radio drama. She is at present living in lovely Luton with her most recent husband and three of their five children.