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“The poetry of Judith Janoo’s After Effects speaks within the silent spaces she has so compassionately
provided as we are left to contemplate, in safety, our own histories. Sounds echo like images
she catches in countless mirrors…” Peggy Sapphire
Stacking Wood
Afternoons, after the day’s flame burns down to ash and wind, after setting the gardens to rest as the sun narrows its angle, its flight equaling night, this month once swollen with wagonloads of mown hay, crisping light now half-shadowed by the eleventh. I tackle the woodpile, mound drying since early spring, fire-lengths of maple, ash, birch, one thick chunk, that’s all it takes to start, that’s all my arms can hold.
The first row on pallets for airflow, coarse, split, no two wedges the same, but fitted between two rock maples, bookends against the drop of light and months ahead when it feels like it’s all coming down.
Smell of moss, pepper, feel of leather, splinters of sand. Alone stacking bones to last out the cold. Comfort of stacking between trees once keeping my father’s firewood pausing chest high, spying the iron wagon wheel rusting against the shed, I lift it onto the shelf of hardwood, making a window through the woodpile, framing in the silence of the mountains. A look out onto the far pasture where neighbor’s Holsteins graze, past the clapboard cape of the widow who needs help getting her wood in. I cinch in the view with winter’s gold, building round and higher until it frames sky purpling over stands of balsam and cedar, green incense of winter, softening this hardwood wall.
After Effects, published by Finishing Line Press, 2019
available to order: after-effects-by-judith-janoo
or by email: judithjanoo@gmail.com