Provenance
I’m in a row of sunflowers, looking up
at the cutaway sky. Then walking a talc-dust path
between beds of pansies, their piebald faces turned toward me.
To the left a swaybacked shed, iron-hinged.
Burl’s tool chest within, leather straps, neat trays stacked.
When he died, Burl left his tools to my father:
awls, hacksaws, wrenches, planes. Their oiled wood
the dark sheen of another century’s craft.
As a child, I would lay out the tools, one by one,
their work coiled deep within them. Would skim
the planes across a woodblock, breathe the green curls.
This was my introduction to history,
its implements refusing to age.
Debra Allbery
Debra Allbery is the author, most recently, of Fimbul-Winter (Four Way, 2011), which won the National Book Prize in Poetry from Grub Street. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, a Hawthornden fellowship, and other awards, she joined the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 1995 and served as the program’s director from 2009 until her retirement in 2023.