Ode to a Hatchet

This hatchet hasn’t bitten through a neck in twenty years. When we raised poultry, it was in weekly use, & also had regular dates with the bench grinder: a grating hiss, & a bright new smile would open in century-old rust. The back of the head flares into a hammer, lending heft & balance to this almost-cross & making it easy to hang from a pair of nails. In a museum in Pittsburgh I saw a hatchet that was also a peace pipe with a bowl opposite the blade & the handle drilled out: a two-faced tool for political campaigning. Whether depriving one’s opponents of their fleshy skullcaps or making the circuit of a smoke-filled room, its true role was to mime death, to undergo burial, should diplomacy demand it, its windpipe stopped up with dirt in a grave shallow enough to allow quick disinterment. A sacred thing, meant to circle from role to role. A hatchet can even carve its own next body, the model for which — as Confucius once pointed out — is always frighteningly close.