Thursday was for Poetry

by John K. Ottley from the February/March 2008 issue Thursday was for poetry until the forecast turned from gray to orange. There is firewood to be sawed and split and I don’t have to do that anymore on rainy days. The alarm winks at my dreams then beeps until my wife’s elbow ends the snoring. The big truck roars to life anxious to be on the road like a hunting dog will slam against his kennel gate and yowl in anticipation when he hears men placing slender brown shotgun cases in the backseat. Gas and a golden chicken biscuit sloshed down with chai latte: one of the 20 coffee options at the Quick Trip where men who work with their hands grab breakfast to go at 5:30 A.M. long before red neon “Open” signs flicker on at Starbucks and Silver Skillet. On the freeway, the sun rising behind a cloudbank makes the sky look as if Sherman again has set fire to Atlanta. The woods are quiet as a graveyard. The great oak, splayed and splintered like a sailing vessel foundered on a reef, leans against other trees: brave firemen who linked arms to cushion its fall. Like a primitive surgeon, my chainsaw severs limbs. Large sections thump onto brown leaves. Into the uprighted stumps, hungry, sharp-edged steel wedges start cracks, widening, until they split through. Halves part like a grizzly-gutted salmon. The sections heaved into my truck call to mind cannon shells hurried to resupply the forward firing batteries I stack the logs in deer camp. Pines lining the road serve as bookends, woods handy to the rock campfire circle. This increases the future worth of our portfolio. Turkey season opens in a month. We will warm our backsides as well as our hearts, flames feeding our hunger for fellowship; a yearning every bit as needy as the poetry that might have been written on Thursday. by John K. Ottley Jr.