Stump

I wasn’t looking for poetry when I posted the advertisement. I was looking for something to do with my body. 

I was young and unwell in a way for which I didn’t have language. I was restless, lonely, and agitated by my own unspent energy. I wanted to feel hurt so I wouldn’t hurt myself. I put an ad on Craigslist offering to chop wood piles for free. The only people who responded were older women with wood-burning stoves. Almost all of them told me, quickly and without ceremony, that their husbands had died. I did not ask follow-up questions and wrote down their addresses.

I was providing a service to my community.

I took an axe from my landlord’s garage, wrapped its head in a hoodie, and carried it across Denver on light rails and buses in an old backpack. I remember the strange intimacy of it. The pressure of the long handle against my spine. The way I stood so it wouldn’t jut out too far. The stories I told myself about who people thought they were seeing.

When I arrived and arrived and arrived, I mostly just said, Point me to the wood. I avoided the kind of small talk and eye contact that leads to stories. I split logs I hadn’t cut myself. I reduced things already dead into smaller, more manageable shapes.

Sometimes they asked too much of me. Could I clear the leaves from the gutters? Could I pull a stump from the ground?

I said yes even when I knew I couldn’t. The stump was waist high. It looked like it had been waiting for me longer than I had been alive. I hacked at the exposed roots, pale where the axe bit into them. But I knew the wood that wouldn’t let go was deeper than anything I could touch.

Most of the women watched from their back windows. At first I called it supervision. That was the word I had. Not concern exactly, and not quite interest. Just the sense of being held inside of a look for longer than the work required.

My flannel shirt—a costume I hadn’t picked on purpose—darkened as it soaked through. The sweat spread across my chest in white, irregular shapes. Salt finding salt. The map of it changed as the minutes passed. I became aware of myself as something arranged for them. A body doing a task, yes, but also a body being offered, without either of us saying so.

In the right light, I must have looked like someone else. Younger than their husbands had been. An idea they no longer had access to.

One of them brought me sugar-free Gatorade. Another gave me a two-dollar bill, even though I’d said the work was free. Her hands lingered.

I didn’t know how to end these encounters. I didn’t know what kind of exchange I’d entered into or how to leave it cleanly. I thanked them, shouldered my backpack, and walked away.

I felt useful to someone. But that someone wasn’t important; the feeling was.

It took a long time to understand that this was already a form of writing.Not the chopping, but the pattern. The repetition. The careful movement through other people’s spaces without entering them, exactly. The way I substituted action for confession. The way I built a practice small and sturdy enough to hold what I couldn’t yet articulate. 

This is how poetry came into my life. Not as an expression, but as a behavior.

I did not write because I had something to say. I wrote because I needed something to do that could keep me from unraveling. Something small enough to fit within a day. Portable enough to carry through it. Precise enough to have shape: a thing with edges.

Looking back, I can see that I was already writing sideways. I didn’t say I was lonely; I went to strangers’ houses. I didn’t say I wanted to be seen; I stood in yards and let myself be watched. I didn’t say I was afraid; I carried an axe through public spaces and called it normal. That kind of indirection isn’t avoidance. For me, at least, it was a way of staying intact.

I see this now in the work of writers whose lives are under more obvious forms of pressure—incarcerated writers, other justice-impacted writers, writers whose time or movement or speech is monitored. Their language moves at a slant, too. It carried things indirectly so they might stay inside a feeling without getting trapped there.

The incarcerated writers I’ve worked with do not say, I am lonely. Loneliness shows up as an animal. Fear shows up as weather. Longing as motion. The poem becomes less a statement than a container. Something that can hold what can’t yet be handled without being spilled.

Sometimes people talk about poems as if they are objects. Finished things. But the poems that have mattered most to me have felt alive—still in negotiation with certainty, and never on its side.

For whatever reason, chopping wood for strangers taught me this before poetry did. Usefulness can be a form of self-dignity. Repetition can be a declaration of staying when nothing else says stay. Sometimes attention is the only kind of care you have available. I learned you don’t need to understand what you’re feeling to build something that can hold it.

I still think about those women whose names I don’t remember or maybe never knew. I think about those back windows. I think about that stump. How easily I said yes. How quickly I believed ambition was the same thing as capacity. How I swung at what was visible and pretended not to notice how far down the roots had stretched.

I’m better now. More attentive to depth. More honest about what I can touch. I’m not trying to explain myself. I’m trying to make something I can return to when I don’t yet know what I’m becoming.

I no longer want to remove what is buried. I want poems that show me where the burying began.