‘All civilized states have considered it their primary duty to provide for equal weights,

measures, and coins.’   

- Report From The Select Committee On Weights And Measures (1862)

 

We’re announced by a little bell as we enter. 

Behind the counter that guards the door—

above ice creams and a chicken-wire cage that holds the local papers—

a woman in a parka jabs at the register with fingerless mittens

while she instructs her helpers on how to stack wines

they’re too young to buy.  We order

 

a firkin of butter

a boll of oats

hobbets of barley.

 

Bring us, we demand, a sack of potatoes that weighs 14 pounds

to those who live hard by the hills to the west

but 16 for those who live north of the lake

and 18 for those at the edge of the forests; and let them bring us

 

a todd of wool

an ell of cloth

hogsheads of wine

puncheons of brandy.

 

For our barbecues, we say, fetch

a chaldron of coal from your yard to the backshop

where light’s complicated arithmetic

adds up its columns of dust and shadow.

 

And if we’ve sent kids back to school

for an extra year (being forced to learn

how to take the world’s measure

in hundredweights and ha’pennies);

 

if our manifests are covered

in a threadbare dustjacket of avoirdupois

confounding merchants whose tenders collide

over the weight of a windle of wheat;

 

if farmers can’t spit and slap hands

over thraves and stimparts

that mean different things in different counties;

 

if we refuse decimals for such music as plays on

in lispound and kilderkin,

leaving nothing in change

to jingle the little pockets of their names, except for

 

a pottle for the woman at the till

a beatment for the boy stacking shelves

a kemple for the child eating an icecream on the bench outside;

 

let our exchange eddy all the more carefully around

such words, plunged like sticks

into the backwaters of commerce;

a currency that only we tender

to celebrate confusion’s adornments.

​

Griffith Review 91, January 2026