The Cabinetmaker's Window

Poems

Steve Scafidi

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780807154519
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Dying never / ends for us. It only slowly rearranges us, " writes Steve Scafidi in his poignant new collection. Inspired by his own work as a cabinetmaker -- defined by the peppery dust from the woodworker planing a walnut board, turning an oak spindle at the lathe, or honing chisels while gazing out a window -- Scafidi's poems reveal both the tenuous and the everlasting nature of existence.

1

Sometimes There Is a Shit Smell Everywhere

When a breeze catches fumes rising from a crack
in the septic and hoo-ee we say who was that.
Sometimes skunks fight under the floorboards

at night and when you walk in—in the morning
you begin to reek of it and by the end of the day
you are fouled with that deep musk of skunk.

And sometimes sanding a small eucalyptus box
made in China 100 years ago the astringency of
the medicine tree fills the barn and clears your head.

We cook chicken and beans, venison stew and corn
bread and sausage and Bill’s wife sent him to work
today with three shrimps covered in coconut sauce.

But mostly it is coffee in the air or the peppery
sharp odor of sawn walnut that smells purple.
Mahogany dust has little claws that tear your eyes

and grip at your insides and sometimes we get what
is called ass-pine which stinks when you cut it
and you have to run away a little and say damn.

But since I was a boy it is another smell—the ordinary
fragrance of this place like the pews of a chapel,
something sober and holy despite the cat piss or

all of the things we say. It smells like light mostly,
what stained glass looks like—like a story being told.
The one where you live in one place until you die.

The West Virginia Copper-Wing

An apple falls through the branches of the tree
and a green snake rises up flying
with little wings iridescent

as the evening begins in the orchard
on the edge of town. Three deer
whisper grazing in the lane.

You could be eleven or twelve
standing with a stillness you have
never before known, a halo

of gnats around your head and this
could be any year in recorded history
of human life. No one

ever exactly remembers this moment
or the next. We find ourselves
in a royal pause and then we go on

asking what’s next. We fall
toward sorrow and we forget.
Someone captures the miraculous

green snake with a net—
pins it to a board. Someone
sharpens a knife at the center

of the earth and it sounds like a wheel.
Houses appear. Thousands
of windows twinkle suddenly in

the settling dark. Stillness,
which was the god of being
eleven or twelve on the edge of town

just before someone you love
calls you home and home being
the god of this place, disappears.

All of it disappears and you are left
lost in the majestic green clockwork
that is next.

This Page

When the shop comes down
and there is nothing left
of the house I love
and the last fragment
of this page is eaten
by a beetle as it hoves
back down into the earth
to sleep away the sunlight,
the ruins of this place will
still cast shadows for a time
and the small blue crow
that swoops down out
of the willow will taste
the clickety scratch of
barbed legs working
against its throat and be
satisfied moving along
by wing and by song to
fly through the world
we had thought enough
once to find a way to praise.
However little good it did
light still falls across the page.

Song for the Holy Ghost

Thanks for the letter B and the long E.
Thanks for meaning most. And shouts
of what could be rage or joy I don’t
know that rumble in the sky and grow
ominous and close. I know it is thunder.
Thank you for lightning over the house
and the sky-high towers of rain leaning
in the field and falling. Thank you
for the shimmer in the walls of heat
the storm breaks just before dinner
so my daughter puts on a sweater
before we eat. Thank you for the lovely
gift of her and all the time we had
that will go on I’m certain in the summer
of what will never pass. Something radiates
in all we were so that we are I hope
what lasts. Love, you are my only word
it seems. You have made me difficult
to be taken seriously by most. You
spill the blood of Being all over the Host.
You take the god of Death who wanders
out through space like an old woman
out for pancakes. You make the house
tremble in the storm until the heat breaks
and we sit down my family in the summer
in our sweaters and saying so makes it
better. Whoever You Are, watch out
for her. Protect her. She has a golden
secret like a soul to say. You should let her.

Two Cabinetmakers

Here’s one—got a Mohawk hairdo and a pot belly
so perfectly round and true it is a thing of beauty
and Chip carves vines and roses, fleurs-de-lis
and hooves of deer for table-legs and turns bright
oak bowls on the lathe, anything really you ask
he will make appear from the grain and he went
to school with me and patiently watches me
struggle with a simple thing and shakes his head.
Says: Here, try it like this instead. He is one who
laughs easy, keeps his chisels clean and honed.
How does a man become what he is? Why
is the undertaker an undertaker and the carpet-
layer walking through the world on his knees?
Our mothers, our fathers? A wobble in the stars?
If you are happy in your work,
what is the cause?
Here’s another—he too carves like a dream,
mends the broken thing. Almost always quiet,
Wade keeps close to the work at hand and leans
in to see what exactly needs to be done. He is
one to whom I had been cruel once—at least
once, stupid and petty for that is what I am
from time to time. Well, once while living up
in the house by the shop he saw I was working
late in the night and walked through the dark
fields with a plate of venison, carrots and beans
and said Here, you must be hungry, and I was.
A broken Windsor chair leaned against the wall.
Steam rose lightly, disappearing as we talked.
The sawdust on my workbench like a tablecloth.

Looking for the Maker’s Name

Sometimes on a table like this it is
up undern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4