Forty-Two

Natural woodgrain, smoothly shaped into

the form of the thing it will be.

“It’s a good line,” he says of the boat,

running his hand along the raw gunwale before

eyeing it once more from the stern.

The sawdusted floor dwarfs his house, and that’s

room one. He’s reorganizing his tools, and we

walk among their groups to the door and gravel path.

He almost died on his fortieth birthday.

He was not, luckily, in this cabin, where pain would have

rendered the phone bric-a-brac among the books.

His mother had said he needed a doctor, and

his father had helped him off the floor.

“Forty-two is time for a partner,” he says, a

second tumbler of fine scotch in his head.

Another friend has another someone

to meet, he says, strumming a few chords.

But what would he do in Wilmington, he laughs.

He has an open-air bath tub, a reloading table,

a coop with three chickens, DVDs from the library,

a whiteboard wall with three dozen recommendations

of books and poets and conversations and films.

Tomorrow someone will pay him a few grand for

new molding, and three more word-of-mouth jobs await.

For now, he sleeps in his loft next to books from seminary,

dreaming perhaps of a boat that will wend toward

in-season geese, maybe soon.