With each day, I feel more <br />the weight of what must be said. <br />The sentences no poem has touched. <br />The joy and strife buried in the ground <br />like coal, and those who go down <br />have come up choking. <br /> <br />So I draw a steaming bath <br />and sink in, and the dying begins <br />and beside me, of course, the pen. <br />The blank paper. The pages I will write <br />that will set things straight, I think: <br />this unnamed hunger, this yearning <br /> <br />but instead, I think of hammers. <br />The sound of hammers, and the haiku <br />about the sound of hammers <br />quickening towards dusk, <br />how as daylight fades <br />blue to red to blue again <br /> <br />only darker this time, gliding down streets <br />over the lawns and rooftops <br />of some small town, a group of carpenters <br />in their singular sound of hammers <br />are beginning to hurry, <br />hoping with the final guise of light <br /> <br />to finish their work. So I take my pen <br />but all I hear are the hammers again, <br />the slack slack of nails <br />sinking into the wet musky smell <br />of opening pine. So much so <br />that as the day’s water drains, I rise <br /> <br />and am nameless, a hired hand <br />in a dirty shirt <br />blued by the thickness of twilight, <br />methodically focusing <br />his eyes and his worn fingers <br />and the swing of wrist and hammer <br /> <br />on the perfect house of his mind: <br />what he is building for someone else <br />but where he has stood each night, <br />in silence, running his hands <br />up and down the unfinished walls <br />like a lover, admiring the curves <br /> <br />of straight boards <br />and the serendipity of nails <br />raising from the foundation <br />the walls, the rooms, <br />and a rooftop <br />under the quiet, darkening sky.<br /><br />Michael Meyerhofer<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/building-the-house/
