& (thirty-three)
By J. A. Tyler


The father, there was a father, he was no words and hands that built. He felled trees. He stooped to sift his hands in dirt, his palms. He was sure and hushed, lingering in stature, stillness and silence. He made planks and boards, logs into shapes and lines. His knuckles dry and cracked, split and bleeding as the blades ripped grains at a time from their bodies, their hollows, the bark shaved and gone. His wife gone. His son looking on, handling the long end of the board, steadying without phrases. There was no father and son. There was work, creation. There was the making of a world from out of blue skies, the ground, the root systems and the forests longing to become something else, whispering to one another. Conjecture. There were four hands and two hearts both wishing a mother. There was no mother. Her hair spun out, her throat closed in raucous flinching and tension. They kept tension on the boards, the quiet rip of a blade and its teeth. The constant chewing, sawdust remainders, the bones of their mother in a box built by four hands, lined with the soft of green leaves, the brown of the earth, the finality. A mother at an end. A father and son, no kind of father and son. Logs into planks into boards into other things. The blue of the sky, the rings inside, the ringing, the quiet of a man and a boy. The stillness. The becoming. The change.

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