After the Hurricane
- After the Hurricane
Without power, we lit candles, cooked potatoes and hot dogsin the fireplace, tried to sleepwith air clinging to our skin like damp feathers.
On the third dark night, the half-dead oakon the Civil War redoubt across the street,crashed into the ravine, rattling our whole house.
I shuffled out the door in flip flops,pointed my cell phone light at cracksin the foundation, beer cans clattering down street gutters.
The oak wallowed like a beached whale in the run-off.Next morning, the Colonel next doorheld up an axe and shouted: Let the damn thing harden to coal!
By the time a town official taped a clean-up orderon our door, ants had colonized its hollows,woodpeckers drilled its bark for grubs.
Chainsawing the trunk from rotted crown to rootsstill clotted with clay, I felt the heartwood toughen,red chips fly from the blade, stinging my face.
On the first cold night of December, I carried split logsseasoned all fall to the fireplace,lit balled-up newspaper and waited.
Like salamanders in legends I once believed, the sticks never burned.They hissed and darkened, refusing to give up
whatever had kept them whole in the dank ravine.Even when I pumped the bellows,only the news broke into flames beneath them. [End Page 70]
Henry Hart has published four books of poetry, the most recent being Familiar Ghosts (Orchises). He has also published biographies of James Dickey and Robert Frost, as well as scholarly studies of Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, and Robert Lowell. Since 1986, he has taught in the English Department at The College of William and Mary.
