The Woodstove
- The Woodstove
The woodstove is banked to last the night,its slim legs, like an elegant dog’s, stand obedientlyon the tile floor while in its belly a muffled tumultroars and cries like wind keening through the hemlocks.
Human nature to sleep by fire, and human natureto be sleepless by it, too. I get up to watchthe blue flames finger soft chambers in the woodwhile the coals swell with scintillating breaths.
What made Rousseau once observe that dogs will notbuild fires? (And further, that in the pleasing warmthof a fire already started, they will not add wood?)What is it to be human? to forge connection,
to make interpretations of fire and contain themin a little iron stove? And what is it to be fire?To burn with indifference, to consumethe skin of the arm as easily as the bark of a log.
Sleepy warmth begins to fill the room in whichlife wants to live and fire wants to burn,the room which in the morningwill hold a fire changed to cooling ash.
Outside, smoke escapes and for an instantmirrors nature, too, the way falling snowreveals the wind’s mind, and change of mind,before world and mind grow inscrutable again.
[End Page 161]
Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, including The Window Left Open (Graywolf Press 2016). She is the translator of Psalms of All My Days, from the French poet Patrice de La Tour du Pin (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014), and of Rochester Knockings, a novel by the Tunisian author Hubert Haddad (Open Letter, 2015). She teaches poetry and translation at the University of Rochester and also serves as the director of the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference.
