Everything new is old again / axe handles
My dear Dad passed on on this day (3:30 AM PST at home in Surrey BC, I was on the Night Shift holding his hand), 2014.
Yesterday I’m holding my boy Ichiro Stanley while his mother sings in an afternoon across the Pacific in Japan.
In a minute-ish will get up, drink coffee (Ichi is grinding beans), wear the red velvet rope he insists upon and make scrambled eggs for us 3.
Later we’ll sharpen knives, then we’ll go out to the kura barn and set up a drum set.
Two months from yesterday, we 3 will ride a big jet liner and make our way to light incense and maybe leave an orange at his marker.
So we go on, oh how we go on.
Bonus
Axe Handles
BY GARY SNYDER
One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the
Preface: "In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.
More about Dad:
* Artifact: Resume of Lorne H. Olson (aka Dr. O)
* Annotations About Dad, Dr. Lorne H. Olson
