The Palace of Almost Firewood

The hut, all time-worn clapboard and tin,
sits on the precipice of the abandoned quarry.
The clapboards are loose, and the roof flaps
when the wind comes from the Northeast.

There is a hole in one wall
Where the stovepipe came out.
It is a bit charred from a generation of heat
in the Vermont winters. A vestige
of an age long gone.

From a distance, it looks like a relic
from the depression. Grey and stark
and hungry. You expect a carpet
to be hung over the door.

None of the windows. All two of them,
still have glass. Just a few shards
around the edges. It is old glass,
wavy and fragile.

You expect graffiti. But there is none.
A place so abandoned, so insignificant
it is not worth marking. There is an electrical cable
dangling from the pole next to the building.

Unconnected, of course.

The quarry ran until about sixty years ago,
well into the sixties. But there is no evidence,
no sign of the modernity
that generation boasted. It is empty.

Having grown up in a household of restoration,
you cannot help but look at the bones,
the walls, The door, and window frames,
thinking through the process, deciding

just how much work it would take
to bring the small relic alive again,
what it would take to bring sixty years
of abandonment back from the brink,

drawing on your experience of reclaiming
the abandoned. Buildings. Furniture. Yourself.
You know just how far the fall can be,
and that the brink is often further

than most people imagine.

Still. There is an endpoint. A place
where there is no saving,
and this old building is there.
The rot is too far. Beams are broken.

There is no foundation left intact
to build on.
So you snap a couple of photographs,
knowing when you return

It will likely be gone. Rubble.
Firewood, for any willing to haul it away.

About this poem.

A poem about the little building in the photograph, which sits in a quarry not far from my house in West Pawlet, Vermont. A poem about abandonment. Of people abandoned. And how, despite all we might try and do, sometimes we are beyond restoration. A peom rejoicing that in my life, in my darkest places, I managed to, just, avoid that tipping point.

Be well. Travel wisely,

Tom