The Tool Shed

Here is a recent poem I wrote which explores memories.  The summer between my third grade and forth grade school year, my family moved from a suburban development in Austintown to my great-grandfather’s farm in Columbiana County.  All this is in eastern Ohio.  The century old farm house, cavernous barn, and many outbuildings were wonderful places to explore and develop into forts and hideouts. 

A pump house drew water from a well underneath into a trough for the cows.  As a kid, the pump house seemed dangerous.  Only old planks stopped me from plunging down into the dark well.  A narrow but long corn crib with opossums and groundhogs living underneath stood directly in front of the pump house.  A larger side building called the sheep shed stood just to the west of the barn.  We had no sheep, 

but this two-story shed worked for storing firewood, a tractor, and miscellaneous obsolete tools, boards, and buckets.  The shed also featured a loose plank-floored loft accessible by climbing a straight ladder someone had made by nailing slats between two studs.  In the loft was an open window that back in the day would have featured a hoist allowing the loft to be loaded and unloaded with relative ease.  When hornets were not building nests  

up there, this was a favorite clubhouse.  We had a dark little old smoke house that was too sooty for play.  There were two tool sheds and a gravel-floored garage.  One of the tool sheds we sold to a neighbor.  He and my father maneuvered it onto the back of a hay wagon and moved it, in one piece, to the neighbor’s yard. 

This poem is about the remaining tool shed.  It was grimy and dark and full of dangerous looking rusted-out tools and tractor parts, 

immense nuts and bolts, heavy pry-bars, greasy planks, and half-used bags of fertilizer. I could never see very well in that shed because one light bulb insufficiently lit the space and the oily dirt floor absorbed whatever light there was. Well, that was thirty-six years ago. Here’s what the tool shed is to me today, as a memory.       

At ten the tool shed is a mysterious place:
a medieval monastery,
a Muslim harem-room,
an Aztec ruin.

Under-lit by two small windows pains cracked/cloudy/missing:
a brown bear cave,
a midnight prairie cabin,
a bedroom for the blind.

Greasy and chunky, the floor is rusty brown with diesel fuel and saw oil:
a nineteenth-century San Francisco street,
a chimney sweep’s bed,
a junkyard dog.

Elders and ancestors worked in this dimness:
amateur blacksmiths,
arc-welders,
tractor mechanics.

There on the brown-grey wooden work bench:
the church altar,
the surgeon’s table,
the writer’s desk.

There beside the bench grinder with its honing wheel worn to the hub:
a thickly sliced black snake,
an ancient coin,
a worn-out old man.

There is the ancient hunk of iron that I want to carry out of that shed:
a newborn infant,
a sacred scroll,
a piece of the true cross.

It is not a child’s toy:
a pirate’s hook,
a detached dog’s tail,
an imaginary ogre.

It is simply too serious for play.