​Conversation in Connecticut


On this crisp fall afternoon, 
Jack swings the axe 
in one smooth motion,
splitting the logs one after another;
gazing out past the driveway
to the stand of bent white elms,
he pauses, then hands me the axe
as if he were asking me to write
a chapter in his latest novel.

“When I left Tehran,” he says, 
“the only thing my father said
was that we would talk again.” 

As I swing the axe down,
the loud thwack startles the crows
hiding among the elms, and I imagine
I can hear them talking in a low murmur
like smoke curling under a door.
Jack grunts and seems to dismiss 
the crows with a wave of his hand,
then fills his pipe, and lights it,
closing his eyes, and I wait for the end
of the story that I know will come,
and he says, “Of course, we never did.”

Later, we stack the wood into long piles
next to the back door, and I build a fire
in the stone fireplace in Jack’s study
while he clacks his ancient Remington
creating his father’s inner world: 
“Something has to burn,” he says, 
“if there is going to be light.”
and I picture the words flaring into flame
on the page like love annihilating loss
or black crows scattering against gun metal gray clouds
on their way to an ocean too vast to cross.

Originally published in The Aurorean, Fall/Winter 2013-14.