PASSING AXE HANDLES
for Victor Streeby and William Harrold

That afternoon in the late fall
when you made this story of
your gift, we heard that even
up unto the hour, the handle
with no axe simply kept your
screen door ajar, a prop, no
wood pile, stump, no aching
echoes out of Frost’s boy with-
out a hand, more likely than
not just something that had
lost what it was supposed to do
& now the dull shaft, maybe
of hickory, or is it oak, rough &
splintery in the hand has no real
place in this home where I live,
yet I set the handle, still shaped
and ready for an axe, on top a
pile of old poetry books & of
course Snyder’s poem comes
to mind with old Ezra’s bookish
gloss & then I wonder who I could
even speak to about shaping this
into anything else it isn’t, but it
cannot be remade and I’m mindful
of Bstan-‘dzin-rgya-mtsho,
His Holiness, The Dalai Lama XIV,
and his thoughtful “interdependent
arising” and see, quickly, the handle
is not lying on a pile of books, and
me, not writing about it here, &
Victor, not having given the gift,
who’s not even here to see what it
is now, a reminder of my own teacher
Thich Nhat Hanh who says the entire
universe is in ourselves. “One is all,
all is one.”  Snyder was there in his
“Axe Handles”& he’s really here
shaping what has been given away,
how this lets the three of us pass on
this rough shaped handle with no axe.