December 18, 2025
Thursday
It seems I’m reproducing a lot of other people’s work in these Holidailies pieces without securing anybody’s permission. Fair use of copyrighted work is complicated, especially when it comes to poems, because they are short and because it’s hard to talk about them with only a few lines or phrases. If there were a way to give my readers this one with a link or a few lines, I would do that. But I haven’t discovered it in any other form except on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, being distributed now with historical material, since he no longer publishes it. This poem is “The Shop,” by Joyce Sutphen, a Minnesota poet born in 1949. It was published in 2000 and used by Keillor in 2008, “reprinted with permission,” he notes. I’ve read a lot of Sutphen, but I’d never read this before. I think it needs some exposure and promotion. Here is it:
The Shop
There was a window
filtering the sunlight,
dusty as it came,
and boxes of nails,
long and dark,
tin-colored and squat,
boxes of silver bolts,
washers and screws,
tacks, inch-long staples.
The vice that could crush
a finger hung open jawed
on the edge of the workbench;
the welding mask tilted
its flat and mouthless face
towards the rafters.
The old harnesses hung
in the back corner, their
work-lathered leather
soft as the reins of memory,
guiding him through the tangle
of one year into another.
What seized me about this poem was the sharp details of the objects found in the shop. Even if you’ve never been to such a place, you know almost instantly that it’s a workshop, not a retail shop, and that it deals in the craft of assembling some kind of apparatus, sometimes with the aid of welding tools. It takes fifteen lines to arrive at the one detail that identifies what whoever works there does: “old harnesses . . their work-lathered leather soft as the reins of memory.” Suddenly, I can smell the horses, hear their snorts and neighs. Maybe this is a big stable that trains racehorses, or boards pleasure horses, or offers lessons to girls like the one I was when I was 10 or 11. The smithy who works in this shop has been at it a long time. He is able to do his work because habit and memory guide him “through the tangle of one year into another.”
As it happens, there is such an area in my house. It’s in the basement, a place I haven’t visited since August the week before Ron died, when our daughter scooped all the piled up laundry and took it home with her. When she brought it back two days later, she had already signed me up with a local minority-owned mom-and-pop laundry service which picks up and delivers. “Now you don’t have to go down into the basement ever again,” she said. And I haven’t.
But I’ll have to, eventually, as I continue to move forward in my life, especially if I decide to move. (Lynn lives 90 minutes away. or she’d be doing my laundry herself.) Because not only is the washer and dryer area down there, so is Ron’s workbench. It’s a small version of the shop described in the poem, with boxes of nails and fasteners, some wood for the small projects he worked on, solvents, paints, polishing rags. Maybe even something left from his previous life, when he lived on six acres out in the country and kept Morgan horses for his older daughters when they were teenagers in the 1970s.
These are the days when I’m searching for whatever will guide me through the tangle of one year into another.
(I have no idea what happened to the formatting after I imported the poem. I have a lot still to learn.)