Glue
If you have some gluing up to do
Let it rain on some late summer day.
If you have a window near,
With an air conditioner,
Please turn it off
So you can fully hear the blooping
Water droplets
falling on its case outside
(but an awning would be better still),
The light is soft and full, a kind of greenish gray,
Like cement or limestone
Or the changing sea.
The rain falls steady,
straight down from above,
a gift from Jupiter Pluvius,
Roman Rain Giver.
If you're lucky there's a skylight in your shop,
Then the soft staccato
Tappings will be all about in stereo.
Turn the music off to listen while
You spread the creamy yellow glue across the endgrain of the wood,
The strong straight grain of staunch oak boards,
Whose edges have been squared and planed.
It's pleasant to assemble objects on your bench.
If you fabricate a plywood box, locate the top
Between two sides
And bring the sides together with your bar clamps gently.
You must flush the surface with the edges
Along each section's length.
Don't screw the clamps too tight,
Or you will squeeze the glue out from the joint
And weaken it.
Now, your choice:
Nail the top or screw it in with drywall screws?
If you nail it with the gun
The compressor breaks your concentration,
A motorcycle will approach your nose at breakneck speed
With you tied helpless to a chair.
If you fasten it with two inch drywall screws
The smooth unbroken birch is marred
Which you must sand and putty smooth.
What will you do?
Must you hurry?
Check the sky.
Still raining?
Rain tomorrow too?
Put the bottom in your box and clamp it up.
Fasten it somehow, anyhow. Get it done.
Eat, sleep and die.
Turn it over.
Now the back.
Spread the yogurt glue around the edge,
Lay the back down carefully.
Euclid said on any given rectangle
The diagonals between two corners opposite
Will be equal, ever.
Check your corners.
If they're unequal, Whoops a Daisy.
You need to rack your box, your brain,
You picked this way to make a buck, you must be crazy.
Sometimes you can nail one edge
Then pull or push the neighbor piece
Until it lines up perpendicular.
If not, your doors are crooked,
No adjustment will square them up,
Your work will lack its necessary honor.
Auden wrote we should honor the vertical man
Not the horizontal,
I propose homage to the perpendicular as well.
If your work lacks its own esteem
You will mutter bitterly beneath your breath
Taste black bile,
But that's another poem in which Achilles is the victor.
Let's assume your diagonals are equal,
Let them all be equal,
For a man who has achieved diagonals will possess
A disposition that enjoys digestion.
Now your box is square and true, you may want to rest.
If you have a dog, or better, two, take them out to walk.
Wear no raincoat, but let the warm, primeval pluvium
Slowly soak you to your skin.
Since dogs hate rain and baths and garden hoses in that order,
Yours may give you sullen looks the first half mile or so.
But soon they will forget, as dogs will always do,
And smell the fog of steaming grassy odors the magician Jupiter
Has conjured up while wearing his limestone tuxedo.
If today your diagonals were unequal
Even if you know they never were
Nor never will be so,
You will now forget to be annoyed
And let the rain wash all that wood dust from your brow.