Boldt Words & Images: Sawdust (a poem and its back story)

By Bob Boldt

Not much talk in my father’s shop.
I stood for hours watching him work
helping where I could. 
I remember how it felt when my sweat
caught the ticklish maple dust,
in Tinley Park, Illinois, 1947. 
 
He kept a supply of gold leaf sheets
in a small Chinese box.
It was so beautiful
the way a two-inch-by-two-inch slice
of pure gold would float, 
thin as the separation between then and now, 
and magically settle on a sign’s lettering. 
 
The silkscreen pigments he used for posters
were acrid as spray paint. 
I smell the word “silkscreen” as I write. 
 
When my father made our family’s picture frames,
the screaming saw blade cut diagonally
and fell silent. 
The small reject section of wood 
clattered into a bin raising dust— 
dust like the words it raises now.

Back Story

Roger, Robert, and Henry Boldt. April 3, 1945

The implications of that mysterious
molecule lead me back to my
father’s carpentry workshop
where, without the benefit of air conditioning,
the masculine particles of
sweat and the clouds of maplewood dust,
that were the wages of
his Sears and Roebuck table saw,
reigned the particle hung July air
in Tinley Park, Illinois, 1947.

That now seems an odyssey of endless time away.
So how then is it that the mere suggestion
of a scent leads my brain to the genesis of such
perfectly framed images, and thoughts
laid with him so long in the grave
beneath all that has happened since?

Will I ever know the nature of the connection
binding that woody perfume to the late afternoon sunlight
of that summer when everything
was so new, where I was learning everything about the larger
world so indelibly and for the first time?

I cannot forget.
My father put down the frame he had been cutting.
It clattered into a bin raising the dust of other cuttings.

Copyright © 2023 by Bob Boldt