tools of my father

i realized recently
that i write fiction
the way my father
works a hammer and level

he came to our house
once to help me
fix a
falling-down porch

storytelling
is very much about
propping up falling
down things

a story idea is
after all
nothing more than
a house you've occupied that needs renovation

he tore up floor boards
that he called pungy
with a hard 'G'
meaning soft, bouncy, unsure

and he brought
the porch down to
its bones
in order to build it back up

writers walk the
boards of their fiction
to test strengths
and mark the ones that are pungy

we toe the sag
noting the bow in the board
treading lightly
then dig into it

my father lived on
a dairy farm as a kid with
his parents
and siblings

picking up as one
naturally would how to
use the basic tools at hand
to work a problem

learning from
experience
that creativity and perseverance
were the greatest of tools

two things my teacher-father
was able
to parlay into a career
shoring up the pungy minds of children

students for him
i believe
were not fillable vessels but
to be built up again and again

he put the level on our porch
and considered the under structure of
lumber that was still ox strong
and he began to toil

the porch was an uneven
collaboration of sloping slats
and rotted posts
and angled boards

he had to investigate
to measure and remeasure
tinker with ideas
before fabricating the new

nothing about
the job was
a straight line
toward a shining solution

he sweat around his collar
down his shoulders and back
cursing a splinter prick
as much as celebrating a snug joinery

i write like my father built
and taught:
with an eye that looks
toward problems as a blessed thing

that the idea of solving them is
not to seek a perfection
but to get to its reality
its core truth, its original strength

my father once
drove a tractor down the side
of a hill as a teenager
crashing it

i've done that as a writer
and have pondered whether
to get back up
i do, because it hurts if i don't

i don't pretend to
have inherited from him
his talents in wood working
or his natural ability to teach

as a builder of fictions, i did however
inherit the mental context of his
being, i believe:
his best tools are mine from him