The Carpenter’s Daughter

 

Over the phone, I don’t hear
the table saw or the air compressor,
but imagine him sanding
the corner of a dove-tailed door.
You come from a long line of nerves,
he says to me, maybe kicking
the roots of a white oak,
throwing Polly a scrap of pine.
He reminds me that Mammaw
couldn’t sleep with the moon
in her room. She’d flatten
card-board boxes, tape them tight
around the pane to make night black
again like the moon was some kind of mistake.
I tell him I’m three hundred miles away,
that the horizon’s bone-thin arms
wrap me like her moth-eaten quilt
I keep carrying into winter.
He never tells me how life might look
beyond his shop doors
past a field of rotated grain
and loose leaves. He stands on
a quarter-inch of dried sawdust
and wood glue, the stuff I’d spread
on my small hands, let dry and peel away
like I was one thin layer from being found.

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Corrie Lynn White‘s poetry has been published in Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, and Mississippi Review. Her nonfiction has recently appeared in Chattahoochee Review. In 2013, she earned an MFA from UNC Greensboro, and she now lives and teaches in Chattanooga, Tennessee.