Elegy with a Brush Hook and Machete

                         Remember when we almost drowned in ’03, the woods

            so thick we only knew the rainstorm by sound of thunder

and violence of the creek, how every day I’d take you to the Stop-N-Go

                         for your case of Natty Lights? Think back to summertime,

            when after lunch you’d pull your shirt off and wring it in your hands

and count off one beer, wring some more, two beers, how in July you’d sweat

                         all the way through last night’s binge. Think back to when

            we chopped paths across hardwood bottoms for skidders to plow

makeshift roads for Justiss Oil pumpjacks to suck black snot the earth

                         doesn’t blow. I wanted to call in sick every day, to feel

            the sunrise through my bedroom pane instead of the company truck’s

windshield. But this isn’t about that. What was I? Eighteen? Drinking

                         creamy coffee the color of soupy dishwater, the callouses

            of my hands sanding the white Styrofoam cup, whiskey from a flask

stirred into yours. I grew to welcome the start of a day filing blades, the rhythm

                         I’d find scraping down, down, up and over. I didn’t care

            like you did for squaring drill sites with double-knots of orange flagging

for the loggers, how we kneeled, panting in the dirt, how you would pan your head

                          to take inventory of the beech and white oaks rooted inside

            the flagged-off square. I don’t know what it mattered, Steve,

which tree we marked for loggers to fell, which sapling we ourselves chopped

                         with machetes. Did the thicket not return what we gave?

            Did the thorn limbs and briars not cut your flesh into estuaries

of brackish pink creeks of sweat and blood? Nothing changes much,

                         does it, Steve? I’m filing a brush hook’s edge for the first time

            in years and still hear you yelling at me, Not like that, Smith. Just give

that damn thing to me. We spent our days counting off paces, eyeballing

                         a hundred yards within a few feet, but I don’t think I have

            the same distance in me. If I count off these paces, where

does a record go? Those days, I dreamt that John the Revelator mistook

                         us for Death, the old Chevy a pale horse, us wheeling those blades

            through chokecherry and wild honey locust, water vines crawling behind us.

But I don’t know of any Hell that followed that wasn’t there before. I never

                         learned much as a surveyor that I didn’t already know:

            how calloused hands have a way of smoothing wood, or else how there’s

markers all over this country, how sometimes a fence is all we have to pass down.