Out of the Wood
If X-rays are nearsighted
our craftsmen have looked into wood
like visionaries; whose hands
have been sympathetic
as healers', fingertips touched
what is not yet visible,
as if the vibrations
of the thunderously toppled trees
are stored there for release;
and so compelling is this energy
they have to refine and polish their wares
like love or scrap them completely.
Consider the huon pine bowls and vases -
one man has entered a two-thousand-year-old
tunnel of cellulose with sharp tools
and imagined them, he jokes,
to be as perfectly preserved
as sacred artefacts in an Egyptian tomb;
a treasure house jammed
with nameable goods and
clearly not visible
in the panel of light
the superfast chainsaw revealed
when the huge tree unbalanced from its hinge.
Now I, loving their drive
for discovery and embracing it
expectantly, see our jostling trees
with a curiously deepened pleasure
in the way the conductor's baton-maker might have
before I saw him playfully
raise his polished batons
in the absence of an orchestra, as if he heard
startling music alight from the wood.
(From Brushing the Dark, William Heinemann, Melbourne, Australia, 1989.)
|
