This elegy for a carpenter is the second tribute I’ll write for my grandpa this week before his funeral. It’s also going to kick off the 62 poems I’ll write at 31 before I turn 32. I tried my best to keep to the 18th century style of elegy, the longer dirge to celebrate a life in an honest and yet hopeful way during grief, but occasionally I broke the meter or rhyme to build towards a specific point.

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Elegy for a Carpenter

The Bells of St. Theresa twenty-once
will ring now ever slower till he sighs
his final feeble wind, both bane and bunce,
far better than our guns the belfry cries:

“The hammer was a stone before the knife,
The hammerfell was heard in Camelot
By Smith and Knight and Drummer near the Fife, 
Before e’en wedge, the hammer’s first in thought.

“Before we wielded wheel or gun or blade,
Before the books and coats we made of roan,
Before our hearth, glue, loom, bread, kiln man-made
The hammerfell we struck on wood and bone.”

Now twenty-once the hammer strikes the bell
and from it ring the roofs in Illinois,
the sound of hammerfell in town and dell,
of hammers striking gables, Jerry’s noise. 

He walked our roads of mud and dirt and sand
until we paved them, shale and chip and stone.
He walked and talked to God as fairyland
makes men see soul in sod, turn stumps to thrones.

He’d stop for stout and story, prayer and joke,
he’d stop for gossip, sympathy, and news,
he’d stop to hear you, hurt or hardy folk,
he’d listen, love, then carry on bemused. 

They loved him for his humor and his homes.
They loved him for his honesty and smile.
He’d work on loves till never unfulfilled
the bonds he’d tied with men and women, threads

Of cords the Lord had woven in the stores
of hardware all around South Illinois
like belts inside a handmade chest of drawers
are loves he tied to things he built, his joy:

On deathbed Jerry’s hands swung hard on hinge.
They asked him, “Whatcha doing, Daddy love?”
He said, “I’m building.” Hammered, tied, and cinched.
“Where at?” they asked. 

“In heaven up above.”

So when the St. Theresa bells ring out
another toll and slower till you die
and rise to winds up there from hereabout
and get a body, new, up in the sky:

You’ll see those gates of pearl and streets of gold,
you’ll see the shops of diamond, flame, and jade,
you’ll smell the cedar, redwood, hewn of old
for kingly halls that Jerry has handmade.

It’s not a smith or soldier or a spy
who prepped a place for us before return,
but Christ the carpenter of soul and sky
whose ownership we tenants now attorn:

But how did Christ once master hammerfells?
And where did Christ discover wood and nail?
And who taught Christ to whittle masterful?
To know which hawthorne shelters, which impales?

Defers it to the maker, Father God.
Defers it to sustainer, Holy Ghost.
He learned it from the virgin womb unmarred.
He learned it most from manful corner posts:

For Joseph could have left his mom alone,
for Joseph could have taught him other trades,
for Joseph could have left our Christ at home,
instead he showed how hammerheads beat blades:

What is it like to teach adopted son
along with holy family handicraft,
to watch your child cross boards now one-by-one,
to turn cross-sections of a house to haft

of weapon, tool, or something older still:
the handle of the universe in hand?
For if he holds the whole world in his will
he wields it by a hilt he melted, manned,

And beat into a cross-guard by the head
of hammerfells he learned from carpentry.
From building home for living, tombs for dead,
he learned to build our heaven’s blooming tree.

Did Joseph know how he’d adopted death?
Did Joseph see the torture in the thorns
of hawthorns sanded or the splinter’s wreath?
Did Joseph know the loincloth’s robe, though worn?

Did Joseph know two tiny wrists that nailed
two boards together would become said boards?
Did echoes of the christchild’s younger wails
grow in his ear: the death cry of his Lord?

When Jesus crossed his boards, nailed one-by-one,
did Joseph flinch and think of Roman swords?
When Jerry nailed two two-by-fours as one,
did Jerry feel the dying of his Lord?

Did Jerry feel the fluid in Christ’s lung?
The skin so parched it too was pained by thirst?
Did Jerry too gape mouth and twitch his tongue
for sponge on stick and whispering, “I thirst” ?

And when the carpenter of heaven’s gates
rewards old Jerry with a body new,
his arm will once again drive nails in slates 
and sand and saw and plane, wrench, level, screw.

Saw Joseph this in wood and nail and saw
when Christ built prophecy from kiddie tools:
cross-sections, cross-guards, hammerhead and claw,
the Infant God nailed wisdom into fools.

“Prepare a place.” He promised roof and stud.
The Foreman of the Firmament prepares.
Now Jerry’s on God’s crew by water, blood,
And sawdust. Glad he got a kick upstairs. 

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