This week our poet is Lawrence Kessenich. He dedicates this poem to Somerville resident and poet Kirk Etherton.

Lawrence Kessenich

Lawrence Kessenich won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize. In addition to the, his poetry has been published in Sewanee Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and many other magazines. He has had two poems nominated for a Pushcart Prize and one read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. His chapbook Strange News was published in 2008 and his first full-length book, Before Whose Glory, in 2013. Kessenich has also published essays – one of which was featured on NPR’s This I Believe in 2010 and appears in the anthology This I Believe: On Love – and he has had plays produced in New York, Boston and Durango, Colorado.

Thoreau’s Axe
For Kirk Etherton

Kirk dives for rocks at Walden Pond,
cleans them, wraps them artfully
with pure white twine, the same length
as the depth of his dive.

He gave me one last night, a little bigger
than my palm, twine knotted lanyard-like
with knots he’d invented. The rock is soft
gray, speckled with black.

My wife, who loves Walden, wants one, too—
who wouldn’t? A man dove to the bottom
of a historic pond, wrapped the rock by hand
and, Thoreau-like, gave it away.

Kirk’s deepest dive is twenty-eight feet.
Another man, with wet suit and fins,
goes deeper, but Kirk likes going down
with nothing but a swimsuit and his lungs.

One story has it that Thoreau, sounding
depths at Walden with a hand-axe on the
end of a rope, lost the axe, which
presumably rests at the bottom of pond.

I want Kirk to find that axe, clean it up,
wrap it artfully with twine the length of his dive
and present that to me. But I would give it
back to him. For he is the adventurer,
the one who cuts through water to make art.

— Lawrence Kessenich

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