Plane of Memory

Behind the door,
In the cupboard where the tools are kept
With the nails and screws,
The secrets of the past remember themselves
In the harsh electric light.

In a distracted moment
Searching for a fixing
Some random string, a brush,
I smelt my father.

His elusive scent hung briefly in the air
As if the dust between old boards
Was faintly rising
Along with the resin smell of planed wood
And the dry, faded cloth of his dungarees.

I felt my boyhood stirring, like a shiver.
The tools and boxes round me
Were his after all, only older now,
Worn by my time as well as his.

Then I was beside him again,
In the shed, by the circular saw
And the knife grinder,
Rows of wooden block-planes,
Cross-cut handsaws and ripsaws
On the shelves above.

I sniffed creosote in the stillness,
And a hint of the leftover paint
That dries in the bottom of tins.

I smelt light machine oil,
The earth-smell of spade and graip;
The sharp tang of twine and sacking.

The window creaked, and the wall boards;
The tar roof expanded in the summer heat;
Outside, sheets cracked on the line
In the warm and drying wind.

In the here and now, my own glory place
Is still stacked with his legacy
And whatever I have to leave behind
Is mixed up with what he left behind for me.

I seem to have spent my days
Making chaos out of order,
Pouring madness upon his method
Until, at last, I wonder
If the doubts of sons are hidden
In the fathers we become.

This wooden room of mine,
Unruly, like my shed outside
Is where remembering
Lies just beneath the surface
And the grime of work.

A sideways look, a glance, a chance aroma
Brings the past out of rusty blades
Out of well-worn tangs and handles.

All that remains is the boy I was
At his side, playing as the day decayed,
Free to come and go, to breathe the air
Inside the dim interior or out,
Listening to the making, the cut and scrape,
Turning, shaping, forming,
Tools like magic in his wise fingers;
Tools like history in mine.

I hold them now.
Every polish and patina made by a hand I knew
Every rasp and turn guided by an eye
I should have known much better
And, for lack of time, came to know too little.
Too late were my eyes brought to bear
On how my father’s tools carved his shape in me.

© BH 2015

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I went looking for a brush, it's true. The tool cupboard is narrow place, full of bits and pieces. It's also true many of them belonged to my father before me. This is no story of grand inheritance. I drunk the case of whisky not long after he died. His tools came to me in chests and boxes to be salted away and, if understood, used. There they remain, still, waiting.

While looking, something stirred the air and with it memory. As if the veneer of now was suddenly cut away. Just as quickly it passed, leaving me the memory of a memory.

The effort to pin it down, recognise it, led to this.

So this is memory, become painless, shaved back to an essence. Nothing, no-one, is entirely lost.