TREE OF SAWS
a poem cycle
by Lee Patton

ABALONE LIMIT

We stroll just inland from Glass Beach 
through the portal-like passage 
where the logging road bridge
was dismantled–just the sky overhead 
now, not log-laden, honking trucks.
Our next-door neighbor honks at us.
He shows off abalone shells arrayed
across his wetsuit, splayed on his pickup’s
seat like a flattened passenger.
“Got my limit. I’ll take these home 
and give a couple to your folks.”

As he sputters away, my head’s as full
of hungry memory as our back porch sink
when my brother came home shivering
from diving near the old dump’s
cove.  Loaded with his limit,
he’d dunk the squirming mollusks
into the basin, their single-muscle
selves stuck to the smooth porcelain
as if still clinging to their tidal life,
clueless that our back sink was only
a holding tank, a prelude to slaughter,
that my father was about to flatten
their flesh with a tenderizing hammer.

ARTS PATRON IN THE GRAVEL YARD

“I am a patron of the arts,”
my brother claims as we scramble 
through his buddy’s gravel yard.
It stashes his cache, long, rusty saws 
among discarded lumber. My brother 
likes to browse the lot, hold a blade 
close to his almost sightless eyes
and caress each rusted tooth.

He’s hired an artist to sculpt the blades
into the idea of a giant redwood.
Each sawtooth edge will form 
the trunk’s vertical line, a tree of saws 
to glorify his seaside shopping center.

I squint into a thin fogbank 
which blurs the green-black, jagged
horizon of redwood hilltops. “So,”
I ask, “Have you commissioned another
saw-tree for the Wal-Mart you’re building
across the highway, on the ocean side?”

 “Naw, that store’s just business.” 
He shakes a blade so it sings down to me.
“This tree of saws…it’s art,” he says,
enraptured by the music
in the metal teeth.

Tree of Saws will continue
it’s publication run through April 20th.

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