This week’s poem, “Springback,” is a delight of rich detail, the gloriously specific tools, textures and terms of one particular vocation. I love how this poem quietly tells a larger back story entirely through its actions, through the truth of its tangible physical work.

Katherine A. Hagopian Berry’s poems have appeared in The Café Review, “Balancing Act II: An Anthology of Poetry by Fifty Maine Women, Glass: Poets Resist,” and “A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis.” Her collection “Mast Year” is forthcoming this spring from Littoral Books.  

 

Springback

By Katherine A. Hagopian Berry

“The elastic recovery of metal after stressing.”  – Glossary of Forging Terms

       After “Work Gloves” by Justin Hamm

It is the nature of crisis to pivot,

like a magnet seeking iron.

I start sewing by hand

you buy your first pair of work gloves

trade suits for pants with hammer straps

briefcase shoulder creased and faded, edging past forty

you leave it the trunk of our old jeep,

drive past derelict farms, scaled and fullered camp roads.

Your gloves are new, smooth like bright bar stock

pale wood of your handle, tongs you borrow.

I watch sparks like geese returning

on the sharp March wind

they settle on leather, feather ruffle, and fade.

You learn to roll axial, extrude backward

the breakdown, the buckle, the harden, the quench.

Inexorably, we become used to it

burns overtake the virgin brown

you search for anvils on the internet

I tell you I am drawn to one with runes and stars

the whole world open to making yourself

like nails you forge and forge again

it takes two hundred, you say, to get it right

round the heads from unsteady cubes,

the stalks from jagged twigs

into something that can hold us all together.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Springback,” copyright © 2020 by Katherine A. Hagopian Berry, is forthcoming in Mast Year, Littoral Books, 2020, and appears by permission of the author.

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