The Fetishing Of Sticks Poem by Mark Mattson

I don’t know why I gather sticks
in hand held bundles bound in string.
Old fashion thick white string,
tied around a clutch of wood
cut or broken to like size in length
and girth, attention given to
knots, forks and burls and then proped up
like grain cut and standing in a field

see here the three and four inch sheaves
six or seven of these with, oh, I don’t know,
twenty, thirty, forty sticks in each.
I never count.

And here several 7 or 8 inch stands
and there, taller ones trussed up
more than twice to hold them straight
to tame their natural aim and curve
like ancient fetishes or offerings,
faux oblates feigning pomp,
they stand here displayed on my shelf.

Those? fallen from the weeping cherry.
These pruned from the little maple.

No dazzle or weeping here in sticks
brittle barren and more brown than grey
that grey that was a deep red once
now resigned to an indifferent tone,
appropriate for something captured
randomly, offhand, and standing
in tight cliques like convicts in the yard

All that is of little consequence
to the posture of the weeping cherry.
It, having been constructed
graft and graft again,
could only weep, it seems,
if altered surgically by human hand,
yet blossoms pink with joy in Spring.

Its sticks did fall, blown and broken
little penduli, dead branches
that failed to leaf this spring.
I collect the rather random salvage,
the discarded brittle barren things,
and order them by blade or breakage
into hand held bales bound in string.

Nor does it faze the deep red & radiant
Japanese maple showing off out front
I pruned last fall, and bundled sticks,
asserting my constraint, and yet,
the wildly dazzling ruby beauty
reigned supreme again in spring

I can only guess why I gather sticks
in hand held brooms bound in string
it has more to do with guilty whim, I think,
-the colored bark against white string-
than harvest, art or ripening.

Perhaps it’s in apology for pruning,
perseverating artifice as penance
reduced, it seems, to landscaping
I can’t let go
in hand held clusters bound in string,
that weep no more nor dazzle or leaf
but stand like sentinels in a sheaf.