Hans Ostrom’s “Sorting The Tools” is an elegy made of objects rather than declarations. In a cold workshop, a group of people sort through the tools of a worker identified by the imprint “Tam.” The opening immediately complicates the idea of legacy: he “didn’t mean to leave his mark, imprint / ‘Tam.’” These tools existed for practical purposes—building shelter, earning wages, securing premises. Yet the poem finds his presence exactly where intention was absent: in a handle rubbed smooth by his palm, in wood darkened by years of “perspiration, / his specific salts.” The central insight is that work itself becomes a signature, recorded not in monuments but in wear.
The free-verse lines move in a plain, conversational rhythm, with no rhyme scheme but plenty of sonic texture. “Fashioned metal and wood” pairs with “building shelter, earning wages, securing premises,” so one practical verb after another enacts steady work. Enjambment gives small discoveries: “This other handle’s / darkened by days, by years” suspends the object before revealing what time has done to it. The poem also uses touch as evidence: “rubbed,” “darkened,” “perspiration,” “specific salts.” The salts are not generic sweat but a chemical trace of one body, as individual as a fingerprint. Even the “mechanism” repaired by hand becomes a text to be read, with the speaker urging, “Note his deliberate, / improvised way.”
The phrase “the practical jazz / of rural labor” is the poem’s heart. Jazz usually suggests performance and flourish, but here it is modified by “practical.” The man’s improvisation was not for applause; it let things keep “functioning / when parts aren’t available / right away.” That is a different kind of artistry—resourcefulness under constraint. The cold workshop then opens onto a landscape that mirrors this stripped-down state. Oaks have “dumped all leaves / and acorns” and exposed themselves as “lithe gray-brown muscle.” The tree becomes a worker’s body, lean and ready for winter. Then a bear breaks the biggest apple tree, an image of force beyond human control. The poem does not explain the loss; it places it beside the smaller, painstaking world of the tools, where damage and repair are negotiated by hand.
The sorters’ feelings are deliberately mixed. “This duty / of ours makes us sorters sad when / we’re not smiling.” The sentence is odd enough to be true: grief and fondness, tedium and awe sit together. Mostly the work is tedious, but “occasionally / we recognize we're awed by what / the tools report.” The verb “report” matters because it avoids sentimental language; the tools are witnesses that offer data—darkened wood, worn grip, mended parts—not speeches. The final qualities, “difficult, / Steady, and determined,” read like an epitaph the man never asked for. The line break before “Steady” gives the word extra weight, almost as if it names a virtue.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to separate ordinary labor from lasting value. It finds biography in wood and metal, in salt and friction, not in public achievement. For a reader, the lesson is an act of attention: objects carry the people who used them, and sorting through such objects can become a way of mourning, honoring, and understanding a life. The man did not intend to leave a mark; his palm, his sweat, and his repairs left one anyway.