Powder

I had three stumps, old growth alder,
jutting from the angle of repose
left by the digging of the landing for my house.
The great root wads were too well established
for the crawler blade to shove,
or its drawbar to pull, even blocked
or double blocked. A friend referred me to a friend,
a man up West Fork, who was said to be handy.
I had seen him with two copper rods, walking
back and forth across a field. The rods crossed,
and he backed away. He looked at the owners.
"Dig here," he had told them, and they did,
and of course they struck a running spring.
I went to him. "Yes, I have some powder," he said,
"a few sticks of forty, they might do." He went
with me in a pickup, with a roll of yellow wire
in his lap, silent. We looked over the stumps,
and then he began to dig between the roots,
excavating small caves beneath the bulge
where root and trunk conjoin to make a tree.
each hole took two or more half pieces,
gently placed, of the greasy, evil sticks,
and one shining silver capsule at the end of a wire.
He handled the capsules as if they gave him pain,
saying: "These are the things that make me nervous."
Saying: "I have seen them go off because a truck
went by, with its CB radio on." I watched his hands
place the capsules, and block the small caves up
with pieces of the heavy sandstone left about
when the crawler built the driveway. We walked
around the bend, trailing two wires, until we reached
the truck. He raised its hood, and handed me
both bare ends of the wires, saying: "Touch one
to the positive post, and the other to the negative."
I confess I did hesitate, I did wish to give back
the triggers to this man, whom I had already risked,
who had reached into the earth with frightened hands
as a favor. But I reached into the engine compartment,
and the land beneath my feet jumped for a moment.
Behind us, around the hill, a cloud of sullen dirt
rose into the air where I would build my house,
and a long low growl, not nearly so loud
as I might have hoped, shambled out into the shade
of the alder woods nearby. We waited a bit,
and as the air and earth grew quiet,
walked toward the unseen place of havoc.
As we came round the corner, from the sky
without a warning sound of its approach,
a sandstone chunk, some ten or fifteen pounds
in weight, came straight down and buried itself
in the driveway at our feet. The man from West Fork
looked down, then up, then turned to me and grinned.
"Well, that was a pretty good one, don't you think?"