Handed Down 
July 3 2016


I squat down and pull,
a bottom drawer
in a kitchen corner
that sticks halfway.

Old tools, odd screws
rattle around its dark recess,
a roll of duct tape jams the opening.

There’s the Robertson head
with the bright red handle
I remember from my childhood home.
A vintage hammer,
its wooden handle dark
from the hands of my forbears.

But these are not the precious tools
accumulated over a lifetime of work
and passed from father to son.
Because handiness does not run in families like ours, 
who aren’t much good at tinkering
fixing things
the manly arts. 

My neighbour has a workshop
full of gleaming who-knows-what.
Complete sets of everything
hung, labelled, cherished.
Immaculate benches,
planer, drill press, squares.
And every saw a man could long for
 -- mitre, table, band
jig, hand, circular.

While I have this Robertson head.
I hold it awkwardly
as if it were some small sharp-toothed animal
 -- squeamishly, at arms’ length.

But a man’s tools 
are to be taken seriously.
And one day, I too will pass it on;
a precious heirloom
of soft-handed men
who settle for good enough
and hope nothing breaks.



The poem is true:  from my own incompetence and my neighbour’s skill, to  the single sticky drawer, to the vintage hammer and  red-handled Robertson. I’m especially partial to these, so the poem is a nice encomium to this fine screw driver: both because it’s a Canadian invention, and because it’s superior to the far more common Phillips head. 

I really get a kick out of specialized words, unfamiliar jargon, piling on:  so lists like “mitre, table, band/ jig, hand, circular” might not strike one as poetic, yet seem to me to celebrate the richness of language. 

There is something powerful about a man’s attachment to his tools. But also something limiting about the conventional equation of masculinity and handiness. Especially in this age of gender fluidity. There was a time when biologists thought what differentiated man from animals was tool use. Repeated observation of the natural world has thoroughly discredited this. It’s not the opposable thumb, either. In my opinion, it’s language. So while I may know only that a screw tightens clockwise, at least I’m pretty good at manipulating words! Which is one thing I like in this poem:  the variations on “hand” (which is also the root of “manipulate”, as in the Spanish “manos”): handiness and handle and hands, not to mention soft-handed; along with manly and man. And the title, of course.