Lumberjacks and lumberjills roll the logs
And chop the stumps. Kiwi man MCs.
A clown in the guise of a drunken idiot
Shimmies up the tall tree pole and pretends
To drop all his climbing gear by accident,
Then does a headstand and falls backward
Off the top of the tree, saved miraculously
By the hidden zip line attached to his back.
In the whole afternoon of contests, the only
Minor injury, despite the axes, chainsaws,
Double-buck fiddles, chokers, and logs
Rolling underfoot is to an eight year-old
Boy who just defeated a middle-aged man
In the log roll, only to hurt his hand jumping
From the log. He cries and is led away.
A local woman wins the axe throw. A Floridian
College student wins the tree pole climb.
“We’ve got no elevation where I come from.
I started climbing trees just to get higher.”
A seventy-nine year old French Canadian
And his weedy grandson finish respectably
In the double-buck crosscut competition.
The man from New Zealand tosses free caps
Into the crowd while donation buckets go round.
These details are not a story, do not need
To be coerced into a story, are precious because
They are not a story, although the anecdotes
Already dance like biting flies above each
Contestant’s sweating head. Memory acquires
The narrative it seems to require like maturing
Forests acquire their understory shadows.
No comments:
Post a Comment