Kevin Hart: ‘Grandfather’ and ‘Silence’

Grandfather

“The suffering of wood,” you always sighed,
Whenever someone slammed a bloody door
Or banged a drawer back into its slot,

Then quickly filed out to your garden shack,
A drench of sunlight all blockaded out
When closeting yourself with walnut boards

And burning smells of varnish, linseed, glue:
An afternoon spent fondling dovetail joints,
Farouk and Rommel never really dead,

Your palm caressing honey grain, as though
Appeasing demons worked in just that way.
I’ve crossed the years to see you clear, old man,

Erect and massive, a pipe your only friend,
Gray curling hair so wild upon your arms,
A surgeon and a lover with your hands

(How young your hands when resting on new wood,
Flesh singing as it touches chiseled wood).
I think you loved the silences in oak—

They understood your own, kept in good nick,
Except in stories once a year, perhaps,
When mates you fought with somehow lived again.

And yet you worked mahogany the most,
Dark knots that quietly show us how to mourn
By tightly filling every loss with growth:

Your home was stuffed with chests and cabinets,
Their aching joints more keenly felt than yours
On winter mornings as you marched outside.

Kevin Hart

Silence

Just listen for a breath between two words
And slowly pull it out to fill an hour.
How large the shortest word will seem to you

And you can live within it half the day
And feel its bristles scratch your labyrinth.
A word goes storming through the universe

For what it is supposed to mean. Sometimes,
It fastens in a flash and brings life back.
Sometimes, it takes an age and carries home

Twin suns that tightly circle one another.
At times, it makes another universe
And you can live there too, but not for long.

Now let an hour dilate into a day.
White oak will step a little closer, love,
You’ll hear young branches shiver in thin wind,

Each leaf englobed in ever-freshing life,
And heavy clouds, above the geese, that sigh
While gazing round for somewhere to call home.

A day can be unfurled into a week,
A week into a season, soon a year:
The silence will not rip; it rears to wrap

Around your berth, basilica, or burg.
It spins itself from dust and lines of ants
And from the distances between faint stars,

And now the simplest word is far too big:
Its thunder rumbles when you whisper it
And all the branches of the white oak shake.

Kevin Hart