August. My neighbor started cutting wood
on cool Sabbath afternoons, the blue
plume of the saw’s exhaust wavering over
his head. At first I didn’t mind the noise
but it came to seem like a species of pain.
From time to time he let the saw idle,
stepping back from the logs and aromatic
dust, while his son kicked the billets
down the sloping drive toward the shed.
In the lull they sometimes talked.
His back ached unrelentingly, he assumed
from all the stooping. Sundays that fall
they bent over the pile of beech and maple,
intent on getting wood for winter, the last,
as it happened, of their life together.
