Shed Archeology

This poem appears in the Summer 2018 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

     Everything stored
     had married rust: my father’s
     red gas-mower, the scythe he swung

     against the tall grass
     before it went to scrub,
     tools inherited from his father—

     bent rake, chipped hoe, blunted ax.
     In a corner squatted a rotten bucket
     of ten-pennies, democratically

     fused. That final spring, it looked
     like a porcupine hibernating—
     or the dog curled up at Pompeii.

William Logan’s most recent book of poems is Rift of Light. His book of long essays on familiar poems, Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods, was published in June of this year.