The door opened easily and without a sound.

Its ramshackle windows filtered the October

Sun through films of organic dust.  Scattered

across the deeply-scored bench‑top the tools,

like relics, were uniformly shrouded

in ferrous oxides,  to the distant ‘Thack, thack!’

       of some neighbouring

       land-man’s busy hand.

 

Beneath racks of pliers; rows of chisels

blunted with stillness was a family

of beech-wood, smoothing planes;

ochre rasps lay over sienna files.

The jars of tacks, nails, bolts, nuts,

screws and hinges, were rusted shut –

     preserving them

     like golden plums.

        

As I thumbed my way through these treasures,

disturbing recent and long‑abandoned webs

and inhaled at his material remains – I heard

the spirit of my paternal grandfather stir,

and wheeze a sigh of deep approval.

  A pile of horseshoes, mud-caked, were hard

     to the touch; the mud strangely

     metamorphosed to iron.

 

When I pressed a small, rusty oil‑can,

it cracked a line of mineral lymph across

my startled palm. From behind mouldy pieces

of farm-tackle, odd fragments of machinery,

the gigantic vice came to my touch.

And when, with my childish hands

     I wound it around, it groaned

     unexpectedly with pleasure.

 

Amid greying pyramids of sawdust;

mounds of scarlet filings; I studied

the ancient tumuli of departed mice

and beetles: the solitary leather boot.

Spread-eagled in the diluted sunshine

    the skeletons of crane‑fly,

    midge and mosquito hung

 

beside the mummies of comfortable moths.

Everything in that shed eked out

its substance on a time‑scale only boys

and old men would understand.  And now?

Any time,  much more than likely,

I’ll be the grandfather myself:

    my work-shed composed

    of note‑books, jottings

 

faint carbon hieroglyphs drilled

into loose-leaf files and folders;

my tools invisible lest for

abandoned fragments  

       and those obvious

       non-starters.