The green canvas chair

The sun is coming up over the roof of the cabin. Light through the trees, trees in half-leaf–and through the spruce.

I’ve just revived the fire that I banked up last night with green poplar. I turned over a log exposing hot coals, threw on some kindling and with a few lung-gusts flames leaped up like happy dancers.

It’s church here in the cotton woods. I take my coffee in an old Christmas mug and watch the fire and feel the sun and know–like William Carlos Williams knew about the red wheel barrow–that somehow, so much depends upon the blue-headed axe buried in the chop block. And the green canvass chair beside the wood pile. And the cooking grate leaning on the sap-loaded spruce tree. And the blue-jays, nut-hatches, and the chickadees and their black-caps.

And my Co-op cap. A cap my dad used to wear. A cap I had retrieved from his cabin after he died.

My dad would like it here. He’d understand about church here. He would sit in the green canvass chair and wonder, brood and ponder, while the smoke would shift and sift up and around and through his black hair and cap.