By Megan Blankenship

Resorted to, mostly, if remembered at all,
retiring into sheds and cellars, pillaring
cobweb palaces, inscrutable of purpose
to modern eye, called by sea
and smoke language as rare whiskeys are—
to be savored the utterances bradawl, froe,
chamfer plane, though as worthy
the guileless post hole digger,
the leprechaun spokeshave.
Let these fine things be loved again
for the simple works accomplished, each
according to ability, not asked too much of,
but trusted—more, at least, than motor.
Bless the place where handle narrows
to fit the grip, smoothed and oiled
against palms, generations of palms—yes,
the very word of satisfaction made flesh.
When a tool like that is taken up
in singleness of aim, it is a gospel.
As if you yourself were the relic barn
kneeling now, almost a heap,
lit wax-yellow in patchy beams
where shakes have rotted through,
having long outlived builder and all hope
of livestock, into which one afternoon
an unaccountable hand reaches
and from needles, nests,
and many other implements rusted
nearly past discernment, grasps
the necessary one, squares up,
and drives it once more into dirt.

---

Megan Blankenship is a writer living in the Ozark Mountains. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Arkansas. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, and other journals. In 2018, she spent six months living alone in an off-grid cabin in the Pacific Northwest as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident.