Drawn from Memory
I was in no particular hurry yesterday afternoon. I loaded some cherry and poplar for next year's firewood and every little bit, I stood against the truck, resting, listening, being in the moment. Above me a sundog covered a circle of sky as wide as I could stretch my arms. The rains are coming. Across the creek, the house seemed too perfect, like the universal symbol for "farmhouse". The faintest trace of smoke lifted from what remained of the morning's fire in the woodstove. How quaint, I thought. How ordinary.
Last night, checking my visit logs, I found someone had read a poem I wrote last October and forgotten. It was the one below. (I changed it a bit from the original.) That I would have seen this scene and then been lead back to it by a stranger seemed to make it worthy of a post.
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Drawn From Memory
From far away, a thin lazy ribbon of smoke
Rises from our chimney, vertical
Then above the treetops, moving east,
Sheared softly by a passing breath of air
That an hour ago hovered still over a pasture
Up in the light, beyond our world--
Bright air that flows serenely down into shadow
From the bright plateau above Middle Earth,
And carries our smoke like incense lightly to heaven.
I see the house, the smoke, through beginner's eyes
Its shape drawn in crayon by a child
And I remember houses of children--
A four year old's drawing on coarse lined paper drawn square
With a thick pencil, a triangle top and
Rectangular chimney skewed obliquely--
A looping curlyque of drawn smoke fixed above it
Young one, will your children's children
Draw instead a satellite dish on houses
When chimneys disappear and
The last wood stove goes cold?