From Bjarki, Not Bjarki, which was published in January by the University of Iowa Press.
What is wood? Consider the teenager’s nomenclature for an erect pecker. A peckerwood is a jerk. A woodpecker is a bird. A group of woodcocks is a fall. A flock of seagulls is annoying. Though wooden rafters support your roof, there is no wood in a rafter of turkeys. There are wood ducks, woodchucks, Wood Islands, Woodvilles, Wood Alleys, none of them as wooden as the personalities of your dead neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Wood, who are both just as stiff as a board, lying, as they are, God bless them, in their old pine boxes. I would, you would, she would: it’s conditional. Wings of ash and spruce flew the Wright brothers a few dozen yards. Blasted into space, a piece of Newton’s apple tree experienced weightlessness. Forests, you might say, are restless. Now, as the climate rapidly changes, they must move with it. Can they do this? Do they care? The willow weeps. Longfellow heard the pines murmuring and Thoreau heard them soughing and in them Whitman heard liquid. It’s the pitch and the moisture in pine that pops when it burns. A cord of white pine contains 14.3 million BTUs, just more than half the BTUs contained in red oak. A British thermal unit describes heat. Heat is energy. One British thermal unit is equivalent to 1,055 joules and will raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. (Joule was a person, James Prescott Joule, b. 1818, d. 1889.) A small diamond fell from your wedding ring and was never seen again. We searched beside the sink and the toilet and the tub. We tossed the sheets. Was that it glinting in a gap between our bedroom floorboards? It was sand. To pine is to yearn or to languish or to moon. To some lumbermen, a log is a stick. To a carpenter, a stick is a two-by-four. Stick it in the wall and it becomes a stud. To biologists, wood is heterogeneous, hygroscopic, cellular, and anisotropic. To materials scientists, it is orthotropic. Just because a board may break as a bridge doesn’t mean it will budge as a tower.
