Wood can never again forget itself
once it’s passed between your hands.
You stroke its grain, restore its green memory
of roots and water, rising sap, before
the axe and the hardening fire.
Your hands
polish Damask steel with its whorled moiré
into a burnished mirror flecked with tears.
I see nothing reflected but my own green eyes.
I envy the wood that remembers its growing,
the steel awake in your grasp. I have not escaped
the hardening fire, the dulling stone.
Come shaper, come craftsman, quicken these wintered bones.
Lay on me your deft and agile hands—
remind me what it is to be alive.
–
Caron Andregg holds an MS in Television/Radio/Film from The Newhouse School (Syracuse University) and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University, and she has taught literature, composition and rhetoric at institutions including Penn State and San Diego State. Her poems have appeared in print and online journals, including South Florida Poetry Journal, Spillway, Rattle, Poetry International, Solo, and many others, and in the anthology Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems. She has been the publisher of Cider Press Review for over twenty-five years.