Wood Pile Quiet





Wood Pile Quiet

maybe your life was complete
by the middle of November
but it ended before August

before July even or June
when next winter's wood
was dumped outside

your bedroom window, while
you slept your morphine
sleep, amazed you woke up

to shadows outside
where the high pile, in a funk,
reminded you of a house

of cards come down in on
itself, but pulled up by
the coming together of

your two hands, usually
sedate in your lap, usually
heavy as a helium shallow

balloon a week after the party
mid height at the foot
of your bed. I'll ask you

after you're dead to tell me
again what you think is comfortable
about this new kind of silence.

Did you lift up the winter
wood in mid-June, the wood
you’d

stacked last summer to make airy
to bring its green up out
of it

by the sheer will of waiting
and did all the little lice who’ve
buggered rent free

who’ve laid eggs after
laying each other, who
birth

and scurry between
the spaces the stove-
wood

has made in the odd angles
of their own rooted
growth

who stick to the script
of their buggy, buggy
lives,

by the time the last
small birch log is reached, (smart
you stack

it bark side up, and doesn’t
it peel away as it ages and don’t
they love

to live inside) a whole generation
has vanished and what’s left
of them:

occasional carapaces some broke
in two, some broke in more than
two,

and where they got to, the living
ones, is your guess if you care to
guess,

but I’m not sure I’d even want to
being you who walked off out
the world

and left the just dropped off
dozen cord of stove-wood
dumped

and you never did look back. 
I’m not sure I want to know, or even
if it means

anything, your being gone.  It’s
like the woodlice: they’ve left their own
sarcophagi

in the birch pile.  And really, it's still
the middle of June.  Who needs a fire to warm
themselves by this time of year anyway?

And if they do, then why?


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