Crosscut: Poems

By Sean Prentiss

Sean Prentiss takes readers into what it means to be a rookie trail-crew leader guiding a motley collection of at-risk teens for five months of backbreaking work in the Pacific Northwest. It is a world where the sounds of trail tools—Pulaskis, McLeods, and hazel hoes—filter into dreams and set the rhythm of each day. In this memoir-in-poems, Prentiss shares a music most of us will never experience, set to tools swung and sharpened, backdropped by rain and snow and sun, as individuals transform into crew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780826361325

Sean Prentiss

Sean Prentiss is an associate professor of English at Norwich University. He is the author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave (UNM Press) and the coauthor of Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. He lives with his family on a small lake in northern Vermont.

Book preview

BALANCE POINT

I discover a Pulaski, a trail tool I haven’t cradled in a dozen years, leaned under the eaves of this Civilian Conservation Corps cabin converted into a writing residency. I bear this cutting tool into a nearby meadow of quavering lilies and irises and find its balance point. At a dead and down, I raise the axe edge above my head and drive hips and shoulders into the swing, feeling metal sliver air before blade chaws into pine. Fists of bark and sapwood leap like spawning sockeye salmon surging upriver. I swing, again and again, showering this meadow in tree’s rays, realizing so many things have changed these years but some things remain, though hidden, in our fibers of muscle. Remembering, and always ready.

I

RETREAT

By twenty-six I have lived

in two countries & three states.

In an apartment, a cabin, a shed,

& a car—running & running.

The city where my lover lives is

an assemblage of noise, a factory

of waste, the racket of rush hour

noosing a knot within my chest.

I’m tired of temp work, washing

dishes, answering the phone:

Santa Fe Community College.

How may I direct your call?

Northwest Youth Corps claims

I’ll get one hundred fifty tent nights.

I have never handled a trail tool.

I have only backpacked once.

I accept the moment the job is offered.

LOGGER BOOTS

Six days before I repair to the woods for a five-month

hitch, a salesman hefts over a pair of ten-inch-high

Westco boots with logger tongues & logger heels thick

as a burled fist of wood. Two hundred dollars, he says,

but these boots will be worth every dime on the trail.

I’ll earn that cash in three days of building duffy

trails one Pulaski swing at a time or running a hot

Stihl chainsaw till my biceps & triceps scream louder

than the two-stroke engine could dream of whining.

But my feet, no matter the miles, & there will be

hundreds, will never complain. I’ll take them, I say,

sliding city feet deep into new leather homes.

GOSPEL

These April nights, shivering inside white wall tents, we echo the trail terms Woods Boss teaches us:

Angle of reposeAngle of repose

Rock barRock bar

Check damCheck dam

These terms become hymns we sing during this week-long Coastal Mountains training, learning to dig forest into