TWO POEMS

1 4 1 R T W O P O E M S R O B E R T P E N N W A R R E N W A K I N G T O T A P O F H A M M E R Waking up in my curtain-dark bedroom, I hear, Cottoned in distance, the tap of a hammer: Tap-tap. Silence. Then anguish Of band-saw on white oak. Yes, I know what it is. My boy, this early, At his five-tonner, at work, the schooner. I shut eyes and see, rising upright in stocks, The sanded gray hull. Dew-gleaming, It swims in first daylight. Yearns long Atlanticward. He lives in a dream of his passion, hands Never quite still, eyes often fixed on great distance. You speak, he at first does not hear. Slowly, then smiles. He sleeps while the blue prints stare down in the darkness. Tools gleam when a star spies in. His head is thrown back in sleep. He dreams Of sail-crack like a pistol, of spume. Gulls scream in their hypothetical sky. Oh, tell me the nature of passion and the flower thereof! What would I have otherwise than truth, even my own dream? Who have waked in the night from a dream In which I, like a spirit, hung in the squall-heart – 1 4 2 W A R R E N Y There saw how, one rag of a spit-fire jib forward, the bows Climbed the gray wave-steep, plunged, emerged, While through rain-slash and spray-roil, Behind plexiglass dome, hands on wheel, the face, Carven, stared forward: gannet-gaze, osprey-eye. Slowly it smiled. I dreamed it was smiling at me. S T A R F A L L In that far land, and time, near the castrated drawbridge where, For four bloody centuries, garbage, In the moat’s depth, had been spilled To stink, but most at the broiling noontide – There we, now at midnight, lay. We lay on the dry grass of August, high On our cli√, and the odor we caught was of bruised Rosemary at pathside, not garbage, and sometimes The salt air of sea, and the only sound to our ears Was the slap and hiss, far below, for the sea has never forgiven The nature of stone. We did not lie close, and for hours The only contact was fingers, and motionless they. For what communication Is needed if each alone Is sunk and absorbed into The mass and matrix of Being that defines Identity of all? We lay in the moonless night, Felt the earth beneath us swing, and watched The falling stars of the season, that fell Like sparks in a shadowy, huge smithy, with The clang of the hammer unheard. T W O P O E M S 1 4 3 R Far o√ in the sea’s matching midnight, The fishing lights marked their unfabled constellations. We found nothing to say, for what can a voice say when The world is a voice, no ear needing? We lay and watched the stars as they fell. Vol. 67, no. 3 Spring 1978 ...