Measure Twice, Cut Once

 

 

One hundred inches nine around at the base,

   Just there where you begin to leave off trunk

In favor of being root, you hold your place,

   I want to calculate, by having sunk

Your taproot down into the clay-dank density,

   Splitting the shale before you as you bore,

Inversely to your leafed sky-bound immensity,

   Through sundered earth, a hundred feet or more.

 

I want to put your age in another century,

  Of years; but cannot bear to think what will

To have stood this lone and stolid oak-willed sentry,

   For five-score years, and standing sentry still;

To have fed, fulfilled, on the selfsame earth each day;

   To have drunken from the same well all these years,

Never tasting the crust of nearby lands nor, far away,

   Embracing fondly new earth/sky frontiers,

 

While I, not half your years, have no such roots,

   No deepened bonds that bind me to the earth,

So ring-boundedly free in my pursuits,

   Detached, I gad about from day of birth.

Feet of clay were not designed to sink in clay,

   But wrought to satisfy a wanderer’s whims,

And a single bond to earth for less than half a day

   Is known to be the rot of lower limbs.

 

You stand in place, I’m moved to see, because you must,

   And for it I am further moved to sigh

To see you still whilst I, in endless wanderlust,

   Must leave you, still unsatisfied, while I

Seek more—past death—yet otherworldly spheres, 

   So cannot stand to see, life-tethered tree,

In holding fast these lust-unhungered years

   You, each day, taste more earth and sky than me.

 

I want to think, in a hoary age to come,

   Some gauging soul, in taking my life’s measure,

Might hold to me a life like rule of thumb,

   And size me up in graduated leisure:

In getting fairest measure of me put

   His tape around my ankle, there, just where

It begins to leave off leg in favor of foot

   That’s had a life-weight wanderlust to bear.

 

With care he’d take just measure of the girth

   (Where skin and bone are at their most demure),

Arriving at my life’s intrinsic worth

   By life’s extrinsic means, and so be sure 

“There was a time or two…” (he’d then declare)

   “He put his foot down, held it in committal.”

He would read it in the sole, and to be fair,

   He’d mark it down I stood my ground a little.