This week’s poem brings us a moment of communion through the humble work of re-shingling. As the speaker of Dennis Camire’s “Encounter with Roofer” gets to know the worker on top of the house, they discover their shared affinity for the ways of the Buddha. I love this poem’s exuberance, how it weaves so many monks and teachings into its fabric, and the irrepressible impulse of its speaker toward enlightenment.

Camire teaches college writing at Central Maine Community College and the University of Maine at Augusta. In 2008, he founded the Portland Poet Laureate Program. His poems have appeared on “Poems From Here” and in The Mid-American Review, Poetry East, Spoon River Poetry Review and Three Nations Anthology. In 2017, Deerbrook Editions published his second book, “Combed by Crows.” He lives in an A-frame in West Paris.

Encounter with Roofer

By Dennis Camire

When he drops his hammer for a noon sandwich
He’s like a Buddha atop a grand stupa
As bare feet set over the eaves while he reads
Thich Nhat Hahn’s “Peace is Every Step.”

And thinking his earlier noise bad karma
For making my morning writing an uphill rhyme
I sherpa into the sacred space of his lunch break
And discover he’s read the whole of Kornfield

And, like me, practices that walking meditation
Where he imagines the soles of his feet
Massaging the vertebrae of mother earth’s
Tectonic plates. Now, sharing cool aid

And koans, we’re like Tu Fu and Li Po high
Atop some remote mountain peak shading
A river below eroding time and stone.
Later that afternoon, in the silence

Which announces the end of his work day,
I’ll climb a second time with the gift of a Hahn line
Decreeing “rainwater is the master bodhisattva.”
He’ll reply “those who say they know, don’t know;

Those who say they don’t know, know.”
And though we won’t exchange emails
To meet for a tea ceremony
Or to play our Tibetan bowls

As I help him throw the remaining shingles
Into the backed-up truck below
Then gladly tie down the sliding ladder,
I know the leak of a future sadness has been sealed.

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. “Encounter with Roofer” copyright © 2017 by Dennis Camire, reprinted from “Combed by Crows “(Deerbrook Editions). It appears by permission of the author.

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