I must say the same boy, again, though I hadn't ordered
it this way, but it happens to be that way
as I was turning the pages.
This is called "Waking to the Tap of a Hammer."
Waking up in my curtain-dark bedroom, I hear,
cottoned in distance, the tap of a hammer.
Tap, tap, silence.
Then anguish of bandsaw on white oak.
Yes, I know what it is.
The boy, this early at his five tonner at work,
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 the first light,
yearns long Atlanticward.
He lives in a dream of his passion.
Hands never quite still, eyes often fixed on great distance.
You speak and he seems not to hear.
Slowly, then smiles.
He sleeps while the blue prints stare down in darkness.
Tools gleam where a star spies in.
His head is thrown back in sleep.
He dreams of sail-crack like a pistol,
of spume, of gulls screaming in their hypothetical sky.
Oh, tell me the nature of passion and the fruit thereof.
What would I have, otherwise, this truth, even my own dream?
Who have waked in the night from a dream
in which I, like a spirit, hugged the squall's heart,
Then saw how, one rag of a spitfire
jib forward, the bows clambered gray wave-steep,
plunged, and emerged, while through rain slash and spray
roil behind Plexiglas dome, hands on wheel,
the face, carven, stared forth: gannet gaze, osprey eye.
Slowly it smiled.
I dreamed it was smiling at me.