Stone Splinter on the Top Flat

[On Finding a Splinter of a Stone Axe on the Top Flat ]


Toolmaking man, I walk in the earthworks, searching
piles of dirt
dug up and out, pushed and turned
by this tool of a bulldozer
to expose a century of tool plough-buried
deep treasures... and
I find an old shard of a stone on the farm’s
family top flat…

Here is other tool artifact! I've discovered an old native tool,
its form is
shaped, the worked edge there, and I imagine
the cracked-off
remainder: a stone-haft absent from this
broken axe edge,
this fragment of the carried equipment of
ancient-tooled man.

For this stone-tool fragment to lie in the palm
of my hand
forty centuries may have fallen under since
the Primaeval
Forest grew here in these cooling krasnozem
volcanic flows,
To which beast and men have sought out
the grunt of life

as we do. Can-do men out possum hunting, scaling
trees like ladders
As if there were rungs, went up like fire-escapes
without the stairs, up
the trunks to the possum hollows, where
the gum-hafted
stoneaxe was used. Maybe it was stone-knapped
further down

this Stony Creek where the cascades bare
A metamorphic glass-stone quarry…
They chopped at tree-locks of the possum place
till, just as
the hard old-wood was breaking away,
the axe chipped,
and the fragment fell here like a lost coin
without image.

But a fat possum was wrung out, killed
and flung down:
the skin a trophy going to make another square
for a man’s prize
possum-skin cloak - and status,
the dark red meat
waiting for evening cooking fires over
towards Yellingbo.

But whether this happened two centuries
ago or ten is
not for me to say. It might be any year of
hunt seasons out
of time. This makes Stonehenge seem
a tent of yesterday.
And, the Coliseum a grandiose
new-fangled bora-ring.

For years I have bent over, leant down, bowed to pick,
as dad, granddad and
great granddad did, whether fruit or bulbs, and earlier,
strawberries and raspberries,
or carrots, before which there were potatoes,
but no prize apple
of the earth has come to hand with
more sense, more

feeling than in this ancient fragment of working
stone, to join stone
of my elemental being back to a primitive,
to first things:
without named maker signatures, with no
sin of graven image,
tying the tools I wield now with men
here of primaeval time.


2006-2009 © Wayne David Knoll