his work

a hand on a saw
one generation gone
a hand like mine
        on wood
        working the grain
this is work
time would have abandoned
long-fallen timber fallen twice
        into disrepair
        disregarded
        failing
the hand stilled
and set aside

this is work
of more than an afternoon
the slow deciphering of invention
the self-sufficiency of war-years’
make-do and mend
its meticulous rebuilding
        a door
        a sneck
        a copper strike-plate
        a contrivance of blocks
closing the door
keeping it closed

this is work
late in the day wood-rot coming on
jambs like nine-pins stiffness seized
in the latch bolt click
step and tread weakened by an eternity
in the reckoning of an age of yesterdays
asking whose hand now will make
the old wood good and remember
the spirit of dead trees and wry design
whose hand to turn the same trick
winding function out of necessity
form out of fragments of a world
once broken

so I remade his door into tomorrow
fifty years and more after the first work
as if this tomorrow might yet be the better for it
I beat the copper plate and nailed the nails again
I shaped the wooden blocks
        to click the lock
        to snare the sneck
        to hold the frame
where all of us go into rooms
as if going would be easy
as if closing a door would be easy
        as easy as metal and wood
        in an agile hand
making the world work as it needs to work

© Brian Hill, 2020

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I remembered a task from last year or the year before: repairing a shed door my father-in-law made in the fifties or sixties. He was a man with the kind of post-war DIY precision only found in those who had gone through the war itself. WW2 had been his show. Like most of his generation he’d only speak of it in Boys-Own terms: derring-do, escapades and plucky drama.

I rebuilt the door, specifically, the lock, matching his home-made devisings. It worked, I hope, as he had designed it. Later, remembering the recovered ground, I speculated that his precocious attention to detail, his practicality might have grown out of his war and grown into a way of hiding the worst memories of it.

Maybe even, such practical things engage the hand and still the mind. And we are all, as we make and mend, dig and sow, in sheds and gardens, finding the same calm place, hiding the troubling world from memory or from its insidious muttering just beyond our walls.