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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE THIRTY-FIVE Aug-Oct (06) > Poetry >Jennifer K. Sweeney - The Bird Carver

In a small cabin, seclusion of pine
and the slanted rods of October light,

a man carved birds with the features
of women. His hands, maple-wide,

also carved from wood, rough
patterns of lines and calluses

one could have studied and questioned.
He would never call his work useful

nor violent, though he took a knife
as his brush. What could he say

of his life´s work? How to know
if the work was good or honest.

Or to measure the weight of a cut
block in his hands, the concentration

before the fingers, hungry for form,
feathered off curls of wood and the blade

began to whittle a kind of music
into the grain. How the life

that carved was like the secret
lives of trees under the earth,

wood falling away as though the man
were releasing birds trapped in the heart

of the tree, that the hands believed
they were the makers of birds,

that their effort sealed the dappled
light into the wings´ fold.

The postured grace of the shapes,
curiously female,

adorned the cabin walls:
swallows with the necks

of ballet dancers,
egrets with sleek feet.

When one was born out
of its thick material, he cradled it

apple-whole in the silence
after a song finishes.

Then his hands felt the weight of the tree,
the stopped flight, the skin

of her–a kind of longing
he couldn´t smooth.









Jennifer K. Sweeney won the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award and her book, Salt Memory, will be out this winter. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in various publications, including Hayden´s Ferry Review, Passages North, New York Quarterly, Evansville Review, RUNES, and subtropics. She was a finalist in the 2004 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition and the 2005 Brittingham/Felix Pollak Prize and was recently awarded a Cultural Equities Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
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