Sport 35: Winter 2007
The woodsman
The woodsman
It starts with the trees. And with their knowledge
of the muddy ground, his knowledge of them,
how he uses it to drive the axe-edge
between the weakest of their stubborn grains.
A crosscut saw lies idle at his side
and its carbon steel fleam glints knowingly
to the rimu which shudder from the wind
as the sour loams disgorge a slowly
growing pedagogy of worm and bone,
an hermeticum of dirt. He ignores
it. He's become a student of his own
philosophy of wood and gnostic saw
and the gully is his athenaeum,
the dull echoes of the axe instruct him.