I want to share this poem before July melts its way into the history books.  It was begun in July of 2011, and two years later I've added the finishing touches.
     I was sitting in the shade on a hot, dry Sunday in July, trying to write but lulled into listening to the steady drone of my neighbor's saw.  It was a pleasant sound and as I listened I began to consider the differences in the work in which we were both engaged; the different ways we build the things we do; other definitions of work.  The resulting poem follows.

Men at Work

 

The rhythmic buzz of my neighbor's saw

eating through hardwood thick July weeks -

arid days I saturate with ink -

reinforces what I've come to know:

we are both the tools we have chosen

to create our handmade monuments.

He constructs well-crafted additions

to his home while I build line on line,

composing verse on such minutiae

as nighthawks circling my son's yard at

twilight, working on his laboring

illusion that all wings at sunset

belong, no doubt, to myth building bats.