"Last Time"

"The festival of eariwigs dispersed as I draggedthe blue tarp off the logs left to season nowfor going on a couple of years it must be. We bucked up the trunks to cut them to roundswith the chainsaw locked to the sawhorseand the floor-the floor of the forest- drifted with sawdust, the air was filled with freshrawness, and the sun came out, and we kept at ituntil we'd split a cord, a cord and a half."

"I dropped Turk at the station and back homestacked the shed for a bit, and was up the laddercutting back the multiform rose when the radio announced we were, now, at war. So I got a beerfrom the fridge and brought Andy's new translationsof Bashō to the hammock. Even after the journey through Oku, and after his nephew died, Bashōkept on embedding infinity into the poem,making each paradoxical animal disturbance just one more part of a wry, undying stillness."

The narrator removes a blue tarp from logs left to season and cuts them into rounds while sawdust drifts across the forest floor. The work continues until a cord and a half of wood is split. The narrator drops Turk at the station, stacks the shed, and climbs a ladder to prune a multiform rose. A sudden radio announcement declares that the country is at war. The narrator gets a beer and reads Andy's new translations of Bashō in the hammock. Bashō's poems embed infinity and paradox into quiet scenes, and a bottle leaves a perfect circle in the grass as dinner approaches.

Read at The New Yorker