Patina
-after an image by Danny Mask
By Wayne Lee
January 15, 2023
January 15, 2023
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Look in the sunlit bucket under the downspout—
there’s more than rainwater there, more than the mottled green patina of its bottom. Look closer—see the redsmith from Michigan haul the machine-rolled sheets by horse cart from the mill by the lake where they mined and smelted the copper ore. See him stack the flat plates in his gaslit workshop, snip them to size and pound the pieces into shape on the shoulders of his mold. Watch him solder the seams, round the lip on his anvil and attach the handle hammered by hand at his forge. Hear his sweat sizzle in the heat. Squint beneath the ripples in the sun-bright pail, beneath the patina, beneath even the copper bottom. There, among the twigs and leaves, everything is returning to the Earth. |
Wayne Lee (wayneleepoet.com) lives in Santa Fe, NM. Lee’s poems have appeared in Pontoon, Slipstream, The New Guard, The Lowestoft Chronicle and other journals and anthologies. He was awarded the 2012 Fischer Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and three Best of the Net Awards. His collection The Underside of Light was a finalist for the 2014 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award. He is currently working on a full-length collection called Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets and a memoir, Service Husband: A Caregiver’s Journey Through Disability, Suicide & Recovery.