Jack-Plane

The oak hand grip and the pilot knob have been rubbed smooth, as though with a dark rosewood stain more in keeping with my grandmother’s hand mirror, more in keeping with her husband’s red raw hands, as though he scrubbed them with a tin of oxblood polish rather than a cake of lye soap. But saying this has an antique quality. It imparts a patina too, some vernacular, perhaps even a little of the thought it once put into work. Of course, I should point this thing at the ground when showing others. And you should never run with it. The same rules apply for handling a pair of scissors. Drop it when ordered to do so, when mentally brandishing it around, admiring how the sole of its rusty iron stock, how it still shines. Were I barricaded in a room, if I wanted to allay the hostages’ fears, I could show them how they are safe in my company for the present, that this brass thumbscrew here retracts the chisel blade back inside a small cruel mouth like a bottom feeder—which is the perfect expression for what happened, when everything is worked and worked over and nothing is left to do, for it to “eat” save the shavings from trimming doors after it rains, those that fight their jambs, that refuse to latch, whose eyehooks no longer meet their eyebolts, doors that drag the rag wool hall runners into a bunch and those oval ones that made for snow shoes in pairs and skis across waxed floors. But what happens when we run out of doors? The hostages love this story: You just can’t keep taking them down from their hinges forever and more off the bottom rail. A constant draft is felt. A light slips free, as though the gate of the witch’s castle had lifted and the shadows on the other side weren’t drawing back in kind. 

JAMES REIDEL

James Reidel is currently finishing a book of prose poems and has published verse, fiction, biography, and, most recently, Manon’s World: A Daughter in the Triangle of Alma Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel (2021) as well as translations of the works of Maria Luise Weissmann in The Early Ripened: Poems, Prose, Translations (2023).