Who Would Know

Woodwork

 

Neat slivers of timber curl into the air

as my father slides the plane across

and across. Whatever he is making

is already shaped in his mind, in a way

I can’t imagine. Six decades ago:

all his tools are hand tools, all

his labour has a human dimension.

 

He stops, quickly writes measurements

on offcuts, walls, whatever

with his flat carpenter’s pencil,

his hands quick, steady, sure.

 

High School, first year we had Woodwork:

I planed a pointless hunk of wood

until it went from horizon to arc;

the teacher awarded a pass,

as bare as my chippie skills

and I never had that class again.

Self-consciousness saw my carpentry off

and I was sent to study Latin instead.

 

Although he never said a word

somehow I thought my father proud

that I escaped labouring for necessities,

the province of the urban poor.

Now, sixteen years older

than my father ever was

a small part of me still believes

that writing, talking and deskwork

aren’t really work at all.

I love timber of any kind,

upright lecterns, the symmetry of cupboards,

the grain of teak, the lightness of balsa.

 

Even now a whiff of sawdust

in the nostrils has my father

at his handmade workbench,

a piece of timber in the vice’s mouth,

his left hand firm on the black front knob

and his right on the plane’s back

with a perfect scything rhythm

shaving hours, years off the sombre air,

Caesar hacking his way through Gaul,

and me, not much taller than the bench

holding the sandpaper ready, so like him

in so many ways, so close, so far.