Poem of the Week, by James Richardson
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.
Most of the furniture in our house is wood, found curbside like the tiny wooden table that caught my eye yesterday a few blocks from home. Polished burled top, slender wooden dowels, sturdy legs, it looked handmade. My backpack was stuffed full of heavy groceries but I picked the table up anyway and carried it home like a baby.
Box beam ceilings, cherry cabinets, oak floors, maple radiator covers. My house is over a century old, so the wood it’s made from must be far older than that, but it feels alive to me. After we moved in I wrote to the former owner, a cabinetmaker who had made all the kitchen cabinets, all the fitted radiator covers, a man who loves wood as much as me but, unlike me, knows everything about it.
Can you tell me about the wood in the house? was my question, and his long, long reply detailed the specifics of each room. Sorry, he signed off. I‘m sure this is way more than you ever wanted to know. I guess you can tell how much I love wood.
I thought about that man when I turned the tiny table over and saw the initials of the person who made it, burned into the wood.
Essay on Wood, by James Richardson
At dawn when rowboats drum on the dock
and every door in the breathing house bumps softly
as if someone were leaving quietly, I wonder
if something in us is made of wood,
maybe not quite the heart, knocking softly,
or maybe not made of it, but made for its call.
Of all the elements, it is happiest in our houses.
It will sit with us, eat with us, lie down
and hold our books, themselves a rustling woods,
bearing our floors and roofs without weariness,
for unlike us it does not resent its faithfulness
or question why, for what, how long?
Its branchings have slowed the invisible feelings of light
into vortices smooth for our hands,
so that every fine-grained handle and page and beam
is a wood-word, a standing wave:
years that never pass, vastness never empty,
speed so great it cannot be told from peace.
For more information on James Richardson, please click here.
A couple of years ago my publisher emailed the cover art for a new novel. I thought it was beautiful – the rich color, the design, the way the title spread itself across the image– so I showed it to the Painter and our painter friend next door.
Would your life be worse then than it is right now? is a question to ask yourself when you wake up every day in fear and dread of something that hasn’t happened but might happen. Something you fight and fight and work and work to prevent happening, to you or to someone you love. Foreclosure. Suicide. Recurrence of cancer. Loss of a job, a friend, a romance.
We went to a museum the other day with no specific purpose in mind and found ourselves in the Chinese art galleries. Jade. Porcelain. Bronze. Ornate vessels for cooking, for ceremonies, for burial. An arched gateway which used to lead to a family’s compound. A room with a low table, ink, brushes, where someone used to practice calligraphy. We peered in through the interwoven black wooden squares of traditional Chinese architecture. At one point a tiny capering man entranced me and I wanted to reach through the glass, and the thousands of years between us, and take him home. 
I’m thinking of the man in the white shirt and the black pants, the one holding a briefcase, who stepped in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square and stood there. I’m thinking of the girl in the long dress, the one who slid a flower into the barrel of the gun the officer had trained on her. I’m thinking of the woman who began a conversation with and ended up becoming a second mother to the boy who murdered her own son. I’m thinking of this tiny beautiful prayer by Danez Smith. A new year to all. May ruin end here.
Remember the man in the photo to the right? He stood in front of those tanks during the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989, nothing but a briefcase in his hands. When the tanks tried to maneuver around him, he stepped in front of them again. I don’t know what became of him. 
Alison McGhee 