Tongue and Groove
In honor of today’s third annual bloggers’ silent poetry reading, here is a poem by my very talented friend Chuck Rybak. It is drawn from his collection Tongue and Groove, which is currently available from Main Street Rag Publishing Company.
"Tongue and Groove"
I
The hardwood floor, laid yesterday
and fit for sanding, waits to be smoothed,
walkable in bare feet. The worker,
machine firing, bickers on his phone
with a woman, a brutal battle drawn
through the dark and resumed this dawn.
You disrespected me, he says.
He’s kept curses in reserve, hopes to hurl them
while working — the sander drowns him out,
drowns her out, overwhelms their shouts
and he hates repeating
his rage. I can’t hear you,
he yells. Then only the sander speaks,
smoothing things over.
II.
Arguing and installation — tongue and groove.
The boards, pounded into place
the day before, forged a rhythm of roar
and curse and heavy-metal music.
Armed with a mallet, he wed
each word and plank with a blow:
You stupid crappy wood
Why won’t you fit?
Then, as if he were a member
of the band, he’d resume a verse
or melody, mid-line, banging along
with Black Sabbath. In the quiet
that followed, he mentioned his three daughters
and I imagined their daily rush from the door,
the leaps that snag their collars and sleeves
on his thorny tattoos. They swing there,
welcoming him home again.
III.
Then there’s the wood, reclaimed
barn wood, the pine of old farms,
marked by hoof and horn, hail and blade,
by a summer of drought, drink, and punch,
by a kicking calf and her mother stiff
with milk fever. The worker
glosses these scars as "rustic," revels
in the spacing, the random width –
no option for a uniform look,
no pick of consistency. After the seal,
the soak and shine of polyurethane,
my barefoot wife and I walk the floor
of what will be a child’s room.
We kneel and read the knots and grooves,
run our fingers with the grain, observe,
Here is the anger that marked the wood.
Here is the love that smoothed it.
February 3rd, 2008 at 3:15 pm
It seems like the wood was smoothed in anger, and I wasn’t aware of any love that marked it, or smoothed it during the poem. So now the poem is resonating and I’ll be reading it again.