Counting Time in Sticks (For My Ancestors)

 

People I never met but who must have known I was coming

have dreaded winter just as I do.

They too would ask release

and count perverse blessings

of lighter days as the air grows colder

the ground harder whiter harder

and fear itself envelopes,

being a real thing.

 

Before I was born they were

counting time in sticks

bundling the seconds

minutes

hours

days

weeks

months

though not knowing these divisions

only knowing without divisions

there are no endings and no beginnings

and sometimes you need both.

 

They had no mittens and no books or catalogs of mittens

and no down throws with lofted ticking

and no monogrammed leashes because the dog himself

had not been invented and the wolves could and gladly would

eat your children (count them).

 

Which great-grandfather lying in the tired dirt of late November

invented the four strokes and then the slash

while looking at his hand

perhaps missing a finger?

 

Did a woman break twigs into equal lengths and line them up equidistant

to measure the days since last she bled?

(Each tilting stick a small death,

a reprieve

a slanting wedge of light above her.)

 

In the Book of Hours

the man

sits at forest’s edge

and dries his boots above the fire.

The ghosted chapters on reverse

whisper August, harvest, maidens surely

and in the margins gold

laid by monks

drunk equally on purpose and absurdity

flickers like summer

in the heatless monastery.

 

How earnestly they lay the leaf and burnish,

my Irish cousins

their breath the perfect warmth

to resurrect

The Word.

Yet in the museum

of the darker pages

in the basement where the docents never go

there you’ll find the wooden plank

where scratched the days

with a gilding knife,

in sets of five chased always by a ragged few,

the prisoners.

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Poem and drawing © Iskra Johnson

Above, charcoal and pencil, “The History of Counting”