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Scythe
JAMES OWENS
My father fought incursions of pigweed, bindweed,
and purple loosestrife. As the blades of lesser tools
thinned and snapped from use, he repaired hoes
and hatchets and spades and released them to any hand,
but the scythe was his alone, a man’s deadly implement
that, swung stupidly, would open a leg to the wet bone.
It glowered from its pegs on the shed wall,
shaft crooked to ease the work, cracked from weather,
handles polished as pleasurable as skin with the oils
of labor. The dark crescent of steel glinted
along its edge in the dimness, attractive but forbidden
for boys prone to stumble in their ignorant gravity.
I remember plain work done as it should be done,
the hand’s or eye’s love for the angle tapped true,
the clean hole dug square, the measured cut.
He sat cross-legged at the base of a slope too steep
and rock-bound for machines and plied a file in curt
strokes that raised a new sharpness on the blade.
Then up, leaning into his own spun center, a wide-elbowed,
flow-hipped rhythm that snicked stems an inch
above the soil, the scythe seemingly as without effort
as light bending through water, he laid thistles and briers
in long swathes, to be raked in mounds and to dry
for the sweet smoke of fires that marked the cleared ground.
-19-