“to get down something ancient”

1.

F brought the remnants of the wasp nest to the table on the deck and it was like looking at a map, contoured and mysterious. It was like looking at the materials of creation, paper, linen, strands of thread, gold leaf. I was thinking of how to sew it, its folds and curves. I’m going to draw it, said, A, trying to find a place to begin on his own page.

2.

The Madawaska River is wide and calm at Burnstown. Soft pines, red oaks. Shall we swim across? We did, two of us, the near shore to the far shore, 5 snapping turtles on a warm log, a heron lifting off, and as I swam, I thought of all the rivers I’ve loved, the Fraser, the Thompson, the Nicola, the silvery Similkameen, the Ashnola, the Prut, the Cheremosh, the Lomna I stepped across on my way to my grandmother’s house, the Red Deer where it flows past the ghosts of my early Canadian family, the Chilcotin, the Blackwater, the wide Yukon fringed with fireweed.

Oh, Shenandoah, I’m bound to leave you,
Away, you rolling river
Oh, Shenandoah, I’m bound to leave you,
Away, I’m bound away, across the wide Missouri.

 

3.

The posts were waiting to be notched and bolted. The tools. Each time the rain stopped, they put on their workclothes and headed outside with the drill, the saw, a tape measure, a pencil. I brought them the square when required, the level, coffee. And remembered earlier projects–a deck, a pergola, a tree-house, and before that, a house that we still live in, our lives, and theirs, the histories encoded in lumber, nails, the beautiful light.

I’ve a small door for the attic
to get back to–to make fit
and fasten and open

when I say sunlight
to get down something ancient–
a charm and a keepsake.

            ==from “A Small Door”, by John Pass, An Arbitrary Dictionary.