Up attic, Lucas Harrison, God rest <br />his frugal bones, once kept a tidy account <br />by knifecut of some long-gone harvest. <br />The wood was new. The pitch ran down to blunt <br />the year: 1811, the score: 10, he carved <br />into the center rafter to represent <br />his loves, beatings, losses, hours, or maybe <br />the butternuts that taxed his back and starved <br />the red squirrels higher up each scabbed tree. <br />1812 ran better. If it was bushels he risked, <br />he would have set his sons to rake them ankle deep <br />for wintering over, for wrinkling off their husks <br />while downstairs he lulled his jo to sleep. <br /> <br />By 1816, whatever the crop goes sour. <br />Three tallies cut by the knife are all <br />in a powder of dead flies and wood dust pale as flour. <br />Death, if it came then, has since gone dry and small. <br /> <br />But the hermit makes this up. Nothing is known <br />under this rooftree keel veed in with chestnut <br />ribs. Up attic he always hears the ghosts <br />of Lucas Harrison's great trees complain <br />chafing against their mortised pegs, <br />a woman in childbirth pitching from side to side <br />until the wet head crowns between her legs <br />again, and again she will bear her man astride <br />and out of the brawl of sons he will drive like oxen <br />tight at the block and tackle, whipped to the trace, <br />come up these burly masts, these crossties broken <br />from their growing and buttoned into place. <br /> <br />Whatever it was is now a litter of shells. <br />Even at noon the attic vault is dim. <br />The hermit carves his own name in the sill <br />that someone after will take stock of him.<br /><br />Maxine Kumin<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-hermit-goes-up-attic/
