The tolerant structure of a woodpile.

Two or more rows deep, each row end-stopped

by criss-crossing pairs of parallel logs

stacked up in columns: its one formal touch, and that optional,

otherwise a matter of simple accretion;

long or high as you want it; the piled chunks

whether trapezoid in section, or half-moon, or witch-silhouette;

knobbed or bulbous, split like crocodile jaws,

or rock-hard uncrackable knots; whether

red oak, black cherry or yellow birch,

bearing each other’s polyglot oddities

with an agglomerated strength, the opposite

of the engineer’s soaring, cross-braced,

precision-cut glass and steel.

I make mine under a maple in the back yard,

from the five cords dumped there each year

by the cord-wood seller’s dump-truck. Mindless work – 

stooping, grabbing, chucking, stacking – 

but I like it: the guaranteed satisfaction,

the exact ratio of effort to result;

how you can’t fail at this if you put in the effort

any more than you can fake it if you don’t,

and its endlessly forgiving form, that too; how a misplaced

or mischosen log doesn’t matter,

how even when you think you’re done

there’s always room for another one on top;

everything coming out right in the end, more or less,

however clumsy its creator.

Having come out of a literature degree and spent two years looking after livestock, tending sluice gates and chopping down trees, I gained a deep appreciation of the closeness to nature and the pleasure drawn from manual labour – at the end of the day you feel physically exhausted, and, as Lasdun says, the ratio of result and effort is a close one.

There is nothing more spiritually satisfying than starting the day by chopping down a tree and ending it by burning the logs on a fire you need to heat a home with no central heating or double glazing.