Glue

If you have some gluing up to do

Let it rain on some late summer day.

If you have a window near,

With an air conditioner,

Please turn it off

So you can fully hear the blooping

Water droplets

falling on its case outside

(but an awning would be better still),

The light is soft and full, a kind of greenish gray,

Like cement or limestone

Or the changing sea.

The rain falls steady,

straight down from above,

a gift from Jupiter Pluvius,

Roman Rain Giver.

If you're lucky there's a skylight in your shop,

Then the soft staccato

Tappings will be all about in stereo.

Turn the music off to listen while

You spread the creamy yellow glue across the endgrain of the wood,

The strong straight grain of staunch oak boards,

Whose edges have been squared and planed.

It's pleasant to assemble objects on your bench.

If you fabricate a plywood box, locate the top

Between two sides

And bring the sides together with your bar clamps gently.

You must flush the surface with the edges

Along each section's length.

Don't screw the clamps too tight,

Or you will squeeze the glue out from the joint

And weaken it.

Now, your choice:

Nail the top or screw it in with drywall screws?

If you nail it with the gun

The compressor breaks your concentration,

A motorcycle will approach your nose at breakneck speed

With you tied helpless to a chair.

If you fasten it with two inch drywall screws

The smooth unbroken birch is marred

Which you must sand and putty smooth.

What will you do?

Must you hurry?

Check the sky.

Still raining?

Rain tomorrow too?

Put the bottom in your box and clamp it up.

Fasten it somehow, anyhow. Get it done.

Eat, sleep and die.

Turn it over.

Now the back.

Spread the yogurt glue around the edge,

Lay the back down carefully.

Euclid said on any given rectangle

The diagonals between two corners opposite

Will be equal, ever.

Check your corners.

If they're unequal, Whoops a Daisy.

You need to rack your box, your brain,

You picked this way to make a buck, you must be crazy.

Sometimes you can nail one edge

Then pull or push the neighbor piece

Until it lines up perpendicular.

If not, your doors are crooked,

No adjustment will square them up,

Your work will lack its necessary honor.

Auden wrote we should honor the vertical man

Not the horizontal,

I propose homage to the perpendicular as well.

If your work lacks its own esteem

You will mutter bitterly beneath your breath

Taste black bile,

But that's another poem in which Achilles is the victor.

Let's assume your diagonals are equal,

Let them all be equal,

For a man who has achieved diagonals will possess

A disposition that enjoys digestion.

Now your box is square and true, you may want to rest.

If you have a dog, or better, two, take them out to walk.

Wear no raincoat, but let the warm, primeval pluvium

Slowly soak you to your skin.

Since dogs hate rain and baths and garden hoses in that order,

Yours may give you sullen looks the first half mile or so.

But soon they will forget, as dogs will always do,

And smell the fog of steaming grassy odors the magician Jupiter

Has conjured up while wearing his limestone tuxedo.

If today your diagonals were unequal

Even if you know they never were

Nor never will be so,

You will now forget to be annoyed

And let the rain wash all that wood dust from your brow.

 

The Saw

The table saw is your wife and child

You eat its dust and in so doing make more

Leaving others in a cloud behind

From sawdust you will knead your bread to nourish

Those you love with your days, your dust.

A good saw wll race through sheet plywood like a world cup Schooner

Slice oaken planks like an Icebreaker,

Mitre poplar like a Steamer for Morocco.

Shave cherry like a Clipper Ship,

Dado maple with a fair wind bladed Spinnaker

.

Heeled over she saws elegant raised panels for the Captain's cabin.

Trims her sheets to make a jig for dovetailed drawers

In short, she'll make a fine Cutter, putting through the chop without chipping,

Always eager when you want to sail again or saw

In your Wanigan.

You'll be her Master:

Admiral Hornblower of the arbor, the arboretum, and the harbor

Odysseus of the wine dark mahogany plywood seas.

A saw that's weak,

Pulled by only one horse will be dangerous

The blade will tend to pick up wood instead of dicing through it,

Especially if the blade is dull.

Unless you step aside,

A board may play the dinner guest you have insulted and rising from the table,

Slap you on the nose.

The sheetrock wall behind my saw is full of holes where wood

Has jammed itself between fence and blade to be slung by catapult

Into orbit

Crashing through the Bastion to sack the Inner Keep.

Best to buy the strongest saw you can afford, three horses mininum,

Half a horse can't pull anyway,

With no back legs,

Its only suitable for carnivals and carousels.

However much you may suspect your vocation is indeed a trapeze act

Such a hackneyed nag will only serve to prove

Your saw is acting like the horse's latter half,

And give you nothing back but trapezoids.

While you look for three brave steeds, don't forget to count their teeth.

In your horse's mouth sixty carbide molars

Should rise from its dark slit faster than bats at dusk

Any less will leave kerf marks on the edges and set your own back teeth on edge.

Your blade must stand vertical to the table,

A line parallel to blade will reach Alpha Centauri

If it's not, when you make doors, the stiles you ripped will

Interact with top and bottom rails drunkenly,

And when you tighten up your clamps, the door will warp and not lay flat.

Then you must throw away the work done so far that day.

Square the blade, or kick the cat.

Your fence too must be parallel to the blade, or

You can't set a course to starboard or to port.

Out of true alignment she will wander in the kerf, yawing back and forth,

If wending to the left, she will wedge your rectangle,

Binding wood between blade and fence, burning, burning.

The weaker saw will overheat and seize up smoking as she comes to grief aground.

You must wait for high tide while the motor cools enough

Tto press the reset button and refloat,

Meanwhile, rub your filly down, lest she catch colic and kick back.

Days when your gut feels funny, just don't even saw.

The blade so keen and quick, she'll buck you all the way back to the barn.

You could lose a finger fast.

At least don't overreach her whirling blade.

Use a scrap to push your lumber through, hold it down, press it flat,

More so if the piece is narrow or the stallion isn't broken yet.

Wear no scarves or neckties, they might wrap

Around the arbor and before the blade can cut them loose

Jerk your face right down to spurting gore,

Turning stallion into Isadora Duncan’s nightmare demise.

If you have an hundred same size pieces to be cut,

Count each ten and look around.

People are not robots

In the space between each repetition

The saw will raise a claw.

If some one speaks to you don't look at him- even

Playboy models frolicking in your shop.

If you need all ten fingers for your guitar, sculpture, girl or boyfriend,

Focus on the blade, the blade, the blade, the blade.

If you're changing it, unplug the saw.

I once loosed an arbor nut that holds the sixty spinning

Great White teeth,

And turned to hang the old blade up.

My bowels turned over-beads of sweat

The saw turned on all by itself

Because the switch had shorted.

My friend Andy balanced his portable on a plastic garbage can,

At day's end, November, cold and tired,

The light was going fast,

Just one last cut and home,

He turned to grasp a piece of pine he needed ripped,

Felt the saw begin to slip,

Reached back instinctively to steady it

Only to embed the blade

Halfway up his palm.

Doctors saved two fingers,

Now he makes left handed subs,

"Did you say, sir, 'Everything but the hots?' "

Take care my gentle sawyer, sailor, cowboy, carpenter,

For every man someday has an appointment with the blade.

She will pull you down through the dark blood slit from which you came and

You'll whirl about for centuries like Saint Catherine on her wheel,

Oscillating giddy on the bushing of your navel,

Your keel caught up in her  spinning spiral pool.

Take care, my friend, lest your wife and child decide to raise a fang,

And you the fool.

Several years ago I wrote some poems about carpentry.  Here's the first.  You can expect another one every week or so.

Boxes

I build boxes for my daily bread.
Some contain the ashes of the dead.

Plato claimed the sphere is perfect geometrically,
Of all the shapes it contains most volume for its surface.
Archetypal consciousness, propounded Jung
Is just as deep as as this, for it too preserves the most
psychic volume beneath its surface.
Every day turns upon these endless spheres
Of suffering millennia as
All of us are bound together spherically.
We cannot populate the world, in Plato’s sense, yet do so.

Einstein has us inhabiting the folded realms of convoluted space-
Relativity is spherical, and not.
Since all atomic junk
Burst all at once in all directions,
Even those to which our mind's eye is blinded by an illusion: Gravity.
Mathematics must be employed to show us how space curves upon itself,
Not out but in, not left nor right but up and down at once,
For when the Bang was Big,
There was no place one could say was
Centered, circle, sphere, line, or point.

Nonetheless, if we disregarded gravity on earth,
All boxes would be spheres
And all flat things we prevent from rolling round would
Float like butterflies around us, smiling.
We dwell between desire and dissatisfaction.
And rolling round, we never rest.

Yet gravity is at once our friend and enemy,
A gentle force that keeps us breathing atmosphere,
Forever bound by mass and weight, ionosphere and troposphere:
The air, the fog, the leaves, the blowing snow,
The clouds we see, the words we speak,
Bind us, as Prufrock said, “each to each.”

In building cabinets we succumb by choice to boxes,
In boxes we shelter safely under gravity's thumb,
Every cabinet installed is square and perpendicular,
Plumb.
Fee, Fi and Fo and Fum,
By the square I smell blood of  Englishman.
Each box I build is nested in another.
In the past, the boxes in my head
Were nested in the boxes of my ancestors

Who, of course, are dead.