My Neighbour Stacks Wood
Mar 29 2010


My neighbour stacks wood
in neat round piles,
constructing giant igloos
6 foot beehives.
Split birch
left to season.

5 sturdy domes
that are testament
to his industry, and foresight.
And leave me feeling like the ant
to his grasshopper,
a parasitic wasp
to his man-sized mound
of busy termites.
He is a silkworm, spinning,
a dung beetle
rolling its prize up-hill
as many times as it takes.

While I burn oil, electricity
punky green wood,
fizzing, sputtering
spewing smoke;
a shunned drone
left honeyless.

A diesel flatbed
dumped a 20 cord load of logs,
rolling-off
in a cacophony of snapped branches and bark,
which he methodically grappled chain-sawed split and tossed
into 5 perfectly wrought piles,
with a symmetry, and weight
I find strangely pleasing.
The kind of work
talkers and paper-pushers envy,
the tangible completed thing
that a man can stand back, hands on hips
and quietly admire,
feeling the sweat, the pleasant ache
the well-earned rest.

Like the scent of fresh-cut grass,
it’s hard to describe
silver birch, freshly split
left to dry.
And even better, when it burns
on a cold clear night
next winter.