When I think of you after these
thirty-three years of absence,
it brings to mind the faces of
childhood friends and playing
outdoors the games we built
rather than bought, until darkness
and our mothers called us home.
Play married in memory to work;
all those years of shrieking
Skil Saws, sawdust blizzards
and hammered thumbs; both
calling forth a smile as well as
a stab of sorrow because
they are no more.
With nightly suppers around
the chrome and Formica table,
hunting and fishing and family
reunions that ended when your
generation, who fired Hitler from
his job as Der Fuhrer, lay down
to rest a final time, strange
that most often I remember:
staking out a foundation beneath
a blistering July sun with a sixteen
pound maul you called John Henry;
or sheeting a roof side-by-side in a
cold and damp December wind and
sitting together on the tailgate of a
pickup after a long day.
When I’ve cast my final shadow, you’re
the second carpenter
I’ll look for.