Whittling Lessons by Eric Schwerer

read Schwerer's "Quintessence"

read Schwerer's "Remedy"

title poem from Whittling Lessons	author bio
praise for Whittling Lessons

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you can also contact author at schwerer@pitt.edu

Of Whittling Lessons, poet J. Allyn Rosser writes:

"The landscape of Eric Schwerer’s poems is both tantalizingly illusive and palpably grounded in real oak and mud and scoops of feed.  We are presented with shadowy events and stark figures that, while richly and grittily detailed in zoom-lens intimacy, are also distanced by a spiritually charged pang of inaccessibility.  Time passes here in strange measure:  there is a “bend” in the summer.  “Night moves like a drunk man counting the hairs / on his chest.”  Schwerer’s haunting visions make me feel as Frost did after glimpsing the grass though a broken-off sheet of ice:  “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight.”  These are poems that offer a fresh angle on everything – often skewed, always intriguing.

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AUTHOR BIO:

Raised in Export, PA, Eric Schwerer attended Allegheny College and The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.  After working as a carpenter in Southeastern Kentucky, Louisiana, and Ohio, he earned a PhD from Ohio University.  He has taught poetry to people recovering from mental illness and now teaches Creative Writing for Johnstown's University of Pittsburgh.  His poems have been published in many literary journals, including Fence, The Journal, Diagram, Third Coast, and Elixir.  A NEW book-length collection of poetry, The Saint of Withdrawal (CustomWords Press), is now available.

cover photograph, “Michigan City, Mississippi 1993,” by Micheal McLaughlin

mm@michealmclaughlin.com

Whittling Lessons

I’m beating my head against the belly of the man

to whose home I once drove weekly

            to learn to whittle.

It’s hard now as then, a boulder beneath his shirt, and

I want him never to have stopped

            trying. I am beating

my head against the belly of the man to whose home

I once drove to learn to whittle.

            It is as hard now

as then, but I want him to never have stopped

            trying to teach me.

I bang my head until his flesh gives in and I

am up to my neck inside him. In

            the guts I find my pocket knife.

(Why would he have swallowed it?)

I hold it to his enormous face,

            long dead, wave it

wet before his eyes and broken beard. A hive of

blood drags inside the present tense. He is

            still missing

a knuckle and all of the finger above it.

He takes my knife in that huge hand and squints.

            Says it won’t keep an edge

but sharpens it and

we begin to carve dogs from little blocks of oak.

            He helps me with the head,

puts his tip below its nose,

cuts the mouth.

            The next lesson we carve

chopstick-sized ribs, pull poplar strips

between our thighs and blades,

            shaving them into thin ribbons

            we are to weave into heart-bottomed baskets next visit.

And then

            I don’t go back.

I am too hung-over, or

            I have a test, or

            I keep those sticks and ribbons

            for years before I burn them.

And then

I don’t go back. I am cold and in need

of kindling and

            I’ve kept those poplar ribbons and sticks.

They torch like a large nest,

            a mess cracking up inside a pot-bellied stove

            I am still beating my head against.

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