Spy Poetry: Soaking Up Sun by Tom Hennen

Soaking up Sun

Editor’s Note: The evocative details of Hennen’s poetry steep us in the special sights and smells of farm life, the blessings of rest, and those magical moments of silence between two people when something important is communicated.

Today there is the kind of sunshine old men love, the kind of day when my grandfather
would sit on the south side of the wooden corncrib where the sunlight warmed slowly
all through the day like a wood stove. One after another dry leaves fell. No painful
memories came. Everything was lit by a halo of light. The cornstalks glinted bright as
pieces of glass. From the fields and cottonwood grove came the damp smell of
mushrooms, of things going back to earth. I sat with my grandfather then. Sheep came
up to us as we sat there, their oily wool so warm to my fingers, like a strange and
magic snow. My grandfather whittled sweet-smelling apple sticks just to get at the
scent. His thumb had a permanent groove in it where the back of the knife blade
rested. He let me listen to the wind, the wild geese, the soft dialect of sheep, while his
own silence taught me every secret thing he knew.

Born into a big Dutch-Irish family in 1942 in Morris, Minnesota, Tom Hennen grew up on farms. After abandoning college, he married and began work as a letterpress and offset printer in 1965. In 1972 he helped found the Minnesota Writers’ Publishing House, printing work with a press stashed in his garage—work that included his first chapbook, The Heron with No Business Sense. He worked for the Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division in the 1970s and later worked as a wildlife technician at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. Now retired, he lives in St. Paul near his children and grandchildren. This poem, is from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems. It is reprinted with permission of Copper Canyon Press.